Mobile phone use can seriously damage your liberty

By Andrew Neilson

Yesterday the Crime and Security Bill received its second reading in the House of Commons and buried deep within it, with almost Sir Humphreyeqsue reliability, is concealed clause 41. The debate didn’t really touch upon the issue other than to say that prisoners shouldn’t be allowed access to mobile phones and this issue is beside the point. The new provision will punish prisoners caught with a mobile phone by making possession of a mobile phone a criminal offence, punishable by up to two years in prison.

Thanks to the economic crisis, the Ministry of Justice is currently trying to cut £1.3 billion from its budget by 2012 and may find itself facing further squeezes to spending after a general election. Given quite a bit of these savings will have to come from the prisons budget, a measure that could extend long-term sentences by two years and increase the prison population by thousands is far from helpful. Every year a prisoner spends in jail costs the taxpayer at least £41,000 and if you throw in the cost of the new jails the government is going to have to build to accommodate the increasing prison population, this seemingly innocuous clause may cost the government a million pounds for each of its 74 words.

This new law is not a ban on mobile phones for prisoners. The government already has this; it is done through prison internal rules, the prison service orders. There is also already a ban on prison officers bringing mobile phones into prisons. This new law is redundant; prison officers already have the power to confiscate mobile phones and prevent their use.

The government may say that criminalising mobile phone use will serve as a deterrent, yet this argument is unconvincing. The average long-term prisoner who has a mobile phone is desperate. They are responding to being locked in their cell for up to 23 hours per day with nothing to do and no one to communicate with. Spending years separated from their families, it is unlikely that the threat of adding yet more years to their sentence will trump the simple human need for immediate contact with loved ones.

While mobile phone use is associated with the problem of drugs in prison, offences relating to drug dealing and possession already cover this issue without adding further legislation. Ultimately, most prisoners are not on their phone running their criminal empires; they are calling their families and while preventing mobile phone use in prison may be a worthwhile objective, criminalising people for a five minute chat with their children is not.

The Howard League for Penal Reform believes that the government would be better engaged in attempting to stop mobile phones entering prisons in the first place, rather than laying down further criminalising legislation. This misguided clause will simply serve to place yet more tension on a prison system that is already facing unsustainable pressure, as the justice select committee reported on only last week. You would think after more than a decade of legislating without regard for the effect on prison numbers, ministers would be wary of making the situation any worse. Sadly, you would be wrong.