Unlocking public service reform: the prisons crisis.
| Author | Cottam, Hilary |
| Position | Crime and punishment |
The prison population is exploding. There are now 77,785 people in prison in Britain, twice the number there were a decade ago and the second highest prison population in Europe.
A prison place costs [pounds sterling] 37, 000 a year-almost twice the cost of Eton school fees and ten times the average expenditure on a secondary school pupil. Yet prison doesn't work. Six out of ten inmates are back inside within two years of release. Six out of ten prisoners are also illiterate and innumerate-they cannot take up the work available in the formal economy. The annual cost of failure is estimated at [pounds sterling] 11bn.
In spite of all this the prime minister, in a speech in Bristol in June this year, portrayed the significant increase in the prison population that has occurred under his premiership as an achievement: 'Prison sentences are longer-I mean actual time in prison. Prison places have expanded [since 1997] and are due to expand still further' (Blair, 2006). Yet these places will be provided in institutions that have been shown not to work, or in new prisons modelled on those failed institutions.
Four years ago I argued that it is time to end the cycle of failure and rethink the basic structure of prison life. Working with an inter-disciplinary team that included senior members of the prison service, prison governors, criminologists, educationalists and architects, we developed an alternative model: a prison that would cost no more to build, and would save money in the short to medium term through a learning programme (based on proven international best practice) that would bring down re-offending rates.
Outside the prime minister's inner circle, there is widespread agreement that prison should be reserved for serious and violent offenders, and prison numbers brought down by a combination of holistic programmes within prison and (less costly) investment in housing, education and drug programmes within the community. Our model-Learning Works-was prison based, designed to meet the needs of the most high risk, high security prisoners, while closely linked to a community programme whereby those outside prison could access learning modules at low cost.
The proposals, based on two years' work with prisoners and prison officers in England and on international best practice, were welcomed by Hilary Benn, then prisons minister, and Martin Narey, then director general of the prison service, and championed by providers in the private sector who argued that they would be only too happy to provide such a prison, if only the government would not repeatedly tender on a low cost, old model basis. Why has so little changed, despite the creation of the National Offender Management Service whose objective is to find innovative and competitive ways forward?
Visiting many of the new prisons, as well as a number of the older Victorian institutions, I have met many prisoners who have clearly been traumatised by prison life; others cheerily greet the prison officers by name as they return yet again; most are just mind-numbingly bored. What is immediately striking, however, is the environment within which they are contained. The new buildings, the daily regime and the internal environment-cells resembling (and indeed containing) toilets, and common areas offering little more than a pinball machine and broken blackboard-are identical to those built 200 years ago.
These prisons, suitable for the early industrial age, are now outdated: little more than massive holding pens. They are designed to repress learning and life-change. Indeed, you could go further and argue that the buildings contain a hidden curriculum: how to become a better offender. In the words of a previous home secretary: 'Prisons are designed to make bad people worse.' This is not to argue that good work does not go on in prisons-it does, and it should be built on, but anything that is...
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