A catalogue of recent reports has condemned prison conditions in England and Wales. A Pentonville inspection reported one of the "most impoverished regimes", with just 20% of prisoners accessing education despite 70% having literacy difficulties.
And at Liverpool an "unacceptable regime" was revealed, with prisoners lucky if they could shower and change their underwear once a week.
Last year a record 92 inmates committed suicide, 29% up on 2001 and attributed by chief inspector, Anne Owers, to the "debilitating and chilling effect" of overcrowding. The suicide rate is higher among women prisoners - two-thirds of whom are suffering from mental disorders, with inadequate care a major cause of self-harm. in June leaked internal Home Office reports revealed a serious escalation Violent assaults, suicides, protests and escapes have reached 1,500 a fortnight, 50% higher than when Labour first came to power.
At the heart of this crisis is overcrowding. In 1992 42,000 people were in jail. By 1997, when Labour won its first term, the prison population had reached 66,000. It is now at an all-time high of 73,379 and rising. Official projections suggest it could even reach 110,000 by the end of the decade. This makes Britain's prison population the highest in the European Union, following closely behind the USA, which has a phenomenal two million behind bars. But this does not mean lower crime rates. 60% of all prisoners re-offend (75% in the case of young offenders) - making prison terms a greater generator of crime than any other sentence. Britain's prison population is the highest in the EU ....
Last year Lord Chief Justice Woolf warned that the jail population was "unsupportable" and described overcrowding as a "cancer". But Labour's only solution is a private sector prisonbuilding programme planned to add only 3,000 places at a time when the system is 7,000 over-capacity - on today's figures.
The number of defendants coming before the courts remained stable through the 1990s. What changed was that twice as many of them were sent to prison - the result of a bidding war between the main parties, the rights. other on "law and order".
Highlights have included Blunkett's insistence that toughness on crime and immigration are necessary to outflank the fascists. More recently he has attacked judges for being too soft and defence lawyers for "taking on the police and taking on the community" by upholding their client's rights.
Law after law has ratcheted up prison numbers. A host of new ones are in the Criminal Justice Bill: increased guidelines for life sentence tariffs for murder; a five-year minimum for gun possession; attacks on jury trial; increased sentencing powers for mag istrates; reduction of defendants' bail
Even proposals packaged as an alternative to custody will have the opposite effect. In the past the courts have used such measures to replace more "lenient" punishments like fines and being an alternative to prison. The Prison Reform Trust has warned that the bill will add 14,000 inmates to the prison system. Yet more proposals are in the pipeline,
Simply bringing prison numbers down to the European average of 85 per 100,000 of the population would cut the numbers jailed to about 50,000 The last chief inspector of prisons thought that a third of all prisoners simply shouldn't be there because they were mentally ill, children, elderly or petty offenders The cost of keeping each prisoner in jail is approximately £30,000 a year. Slashing numbers to saner levels would save money that could be ploughed into education, mental health, drug rehabilitation projects and child-care. And that is without considering measures to tackle the social and economic root causes of crime.
page 3 of the scan
sistance ice Summer 2003 3