80,000 people in our jails at £40,000 a head – we cannot carry on like this

By Stephen Gummer

Monday 20th July saw the launch of the All Party Parliamentary Local Government Group’s report regarding Justice in Communities. The report sets out a daring challenge to the modern justice system and demands that primary justice, particularly dealing with offenders, should be a matter left to local authorities.

The report recommends a scheme under which 35% of the prison budget would be used to set up a system of local service providers that would help communities deal with offenders in their own communities. Behind the report is the sincere belief that a new approach is needed when it comes to criminal justice.

This underlying ethos at the base of the report is hard to deny. Britain has a staggering recidivism rate, 67% of offenders re-offend within 2 years of their release, the prison system currently houses about 80,000 men and women who each cost £40,000 per year to jail. Centralised mass imprisonment, as a means of dealing with crime, has totally failed.

The Government itself over the past year has appeared in part to accept this. The announcement that titan prisons were being scrapped was symptomatic of the final breath of a one size fits all penal system.

Instead, the APPG’s report focuses on the need for local solutions which could take account of the diverse needs of the prison population, for example the incredible number of prisoners who have mental health difficulties (about ¾’s) would be offered treatment rather than an unhelpful period in jail. Most essentially the report focuses on the importance of a link to employment for offenders so that they will always remain part of the working population and will be less likely to re-offend.

The APPG’s findings come just a few short weeks after the publication of the English Commission on Prison Today’s Report (which Cherie Booth QC wrote expertly about on this site just a few weeks ago) and the Centre for Social Justice’s Report, aptly named, “Locked Up Potential“. All of these reports have suggested radical reform is necessary in how we sentence people in the UK and that prison as a means of punishment is not working.

The APPG’s latest report is in some ways the least comprehensive of this recent spate of reports as it deals with a wider range of topics, local justice as a whole. However where it shines is it’s understanding of the need to create a public consensus around the introduction of alternatives to just locking offenders up. Restorative justice in the community is perhaps the most likely way to take the people along with the government. People will be able to see restorative justice in action, either through community sentencing or the success rate of treatment facilities. Justice being closer to local people means they can scrutinise its output and this is the only way they will come to accept it as a genuinely better option.

Devolution of sentencing practice is a complex issue and it would fool-hardy to believe that all the problems of one, one-size-fits-all system could be rectified by making another large and overly generalised change. In the APPG’s own words this report is meant to be a “challenge – not a commitment”. It does not pretend to have all the answers. However it does explore some interesting options about helping offenders rehabilitate within their own community and helping the community to benefit from work done by offenders. There are undoubted benefits to localism when it comes to penal policy in the UK. Most importantly today’s report adds to the rising tide of criminal justice analysis that suggest that we cannot simply carry on as we are.