I agree, of course, that Mr Grayling and his tub-thumpers in the Daily Mail have made a bad situation much worse, but it would still be unfair to blame the Coalition entirely for the current crisis. And also Labour who initiated the programme of prison closures that has left many of the remaining jails dangerously overcrowded. That has proved to be the root cause of much of the "mental torture" that has been suffered by a sizeable number of cons since 2005. It's worth remembering that many of the negative policies concerning the Prison Service and the massive increase in the use of custodial penalties for non-violent civil matters (ie ASBO and their ilk) were New Labour's big ideas that failed, but were embraced enthusiastically and extended further by the Coalition.Īlso, it was David Blunkett as Home Secretary who launched the catastrophic Indeterminate Sentences for Public Protection (IPP) - abandoned in 2012, yet still clogging up our prisons with inmates who are often many years over their minimum tariffs.
While we may see some change in terms of political parties in government, I'm not at all convinced that this will translate into a root and branch reappraisal of criminal justice system policies - or additional resources where they are needed. Get rid of the chaps at the top, acknowledge a there is a real crisis and start to fix the mess. Whitehall penny pinchers need to see how their own government has brought criminal justice to it's knees. Putting a convicted criminal with serious issues in a cell for 23 hours a day at a massive cost to the public purse is not helping society. Rehabilitation and healthcare is the key to preventing further offences. It's absolutely ridiculous in this day and age that a government incarceration scheme of (a significantly mentally ill) inmates is doing absolutely nothing to protect the general public from further offences. Not only the physical conditions, also the emotional torture imposed on inmates and the total lack of rehabilitation. Anybody who has any first hand experience as either staff or residents would know the real state of our prison estate - a disgrace. In no way do I advocate that prisons should be luxury holiday camps, they shouldn't be squalid hovels either. Compare that to our 'justice' system things look much worse. maybe not a perfect world but not too bad. In general our public services do on the whole meet our needs - we pay our taxes, kids get educated, bins get collected, our health is looked after etc. I don't want to get party political about who should replace the imbeciles running our criminal justice system but surely a good shake up is so much better then what we have now - whatever political colour they are. "what are we going to do about it?" May 7th should hopefully make a change. The staff shortages that have been inflicted on the system are ludicrous and do nothing to help save money in the long run or to deal with the reoffending rate because the end costs of locking people up 23 hours a day for months at a time will be far more extensive in the long run given that virtually everyone in prison will be released eventually.īut as I've said before the system will never change until people who have actually been the service users are actually integrated into the policy making then we might finally get a penal system fit for purpose. The powers that be constantly wonder why reoffending rates are so high - it will never change unless there is a radical rethink of what prison is for.
Amongst other things we talked a lot about what a prison system that actually works should look like and it is so far removed from the regime described above it's not funny. it is the third interview in the study: the first whilst still incarcerated, the second three months after release and the third one a year after release. I spoke today to a criminologist who is conducting a study for Holloway about helping to reduce reoffending.
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