IF THERE WAS one slogan that seemed to sum up the harshness of the last Conservative Government, it was surely “Prison works”. Michael Howard’s bald and simplistic statement was designed to warm Tory members’ hearts, to prove that his party was tough on crime and — by default — that Labour was soft.
So what more iconic change could the new Conservatives now undergo than that their Home Office team should start proclaiming: “Prison doesn’t work”? Sure enough, Edward Garnier, the Shadow Minister for Home Affairs, whose remit includes prisons and criminal justice, is saying just that. He wants to remodel the Tories’ whole approach to prison and prisoners — and, as he puts it: “I’m on a massive voyage of discovery.”
So what has he discovered? That prison is “wasting lives and wasting money”. Each prisoner costs the taxpayer £37,000 a year, yet more than 70 per cent of young offenders and more than 60 per cent of adults reoffend within two years of their release. Prisons, in other words, are pretty useless at rehabilitation. And the human cost can be measured not just in those offenders’ lives, but in the lives of their victims too.
Mr Garnier is struck by the nexus of problems that prisoners exhibit. Two thirds were unemployed before entering jail — not unrelated to the fact that 65 per cent are no more numerate than the average 11-year-old and only a fifth are literate enough to fill in a job application form. Most have no qualifications at all.
On top of this, more than 70 per cent of prisoners suffer from two or more mental disorders and more than half use Class A drugs (mainly heroin, crack or cocaine). Many are also dependent on alcohol. Meanwhile, prisoners are fourteen times more likely than the general population to have been in care as children, ten times more likely to have truanted regularly and thirty times more likely to have been homeless before entering jail.
As Mr Garnier describes it, it is a “no-brainer”. If you are a homeless drug addict, you commit a crime to finance your habit and end up in prison, where you continue to take drugs. When you emerge, you have no home to go to and still need to finance your drug addiction, so you commit a crime again — and end up back in jail.
He is shocked that just 2 per cent of the prisons budget is spent on education and that drug rehabilitation is not available for all prisoners who want it. He is interested in offering incentives to prisoners to take part in education programmes in jail, perhaps a shorter sentence if they reach a certain standard. The Social Exclusion Unit has found that prisoners who do not take part in education or training are three times more likely to be reconvicted.
As for mental health, he believes that, since the closure of mental hospitals undertaken by the last Conservative Government, there are now too many people in prison who ought to be in hospital instead. The Tories, he admits, ought to rethink that policy.
And there is far too little support and supervision for offenders leaving jail. A shocking proportion have no home to go to and no job lined up. Those who have been lucky enough to come off drugs in prison are often released with no help to cope with living without drugs outside. Mr Garnier would like to see prisoners living in a halfway house inside jail for the last three months of their sentence, learning to readjust, and in a halfway house outside prison for their first three months of freedom.
None of this is yet official party policy. David Davis, the Shadow Home Secretary, has to endorse it first — though he is apparently open to persuasion. David Cameron is enthusiastically supportive. He agrees with it in principle, and also sees how effective it could be in rebranding the Tories as a party with a social conscience.
People always claim that there are no votes in these Cinderella issues: prisons, mental health, homelessness, children in care. It is certainly true that prisoners, children and homeless people don’t or can’t vote. But that is not the same thing. Many other voters care about these social problems either out of altruism or enlightened self-interest.
If prisons are hugely expensive and are not working, every taxpayer should have an interest in spending the money better. If criminals come out of jail only to reoffend, every citizen should worry about becoming a victim of crime. You don’t have to lament Britain’s fractured society to want political parties to address these problems.
But it is going to take a huge amount of explaining to persuade people that the Tories are not simply going soft on crime. Labour will seize on this charge; they already revel in portraying the Lib Dems that way. Mr Garnier will need all his QC’s skills to defend his case.
Much of his analysis, though, is shared by Labour. For instance, he is zealous about early intervention in children’s lives. Schools try to force too many pupils down an academic path when they could be learning vocational or technical skills that might interest them more. “Bored children commit crimes, bored children take drugs.” And, of course, they get excluded from school. Half of all male prisoners were excluded, compared with just 2 per cent of the general population.
Mr Garnier sounds evangelical about this, and very un-Tory. “Realists say to me: ‘Dream on.’ But if I don’t start dreaming now, we’ll never mend this.” I sense there is a new slogan here, on the tip of his tongue. “Tough on the causes of crime,” perhaps?
maryann.sieghart@thetimes.co.uk
