Prison could work, but it isn't working now
Prison, any Lower Sixth debater will tell you, serves three functions: retribution, deterrence and reformation. In truth, it fails at all three: 40 per cent of offenders are reconvicted.
No, there is only one thing that prison does effectively: it immobilises a chunk of the criminal population. Michael Howard’s “prison works” strategy was based on the simple observation that a disproportionate number of crimes are committed by a relatively small number of young men. When those young men are behind bars, the crime rate falls.
Still, as Ken Clarke says, incarceration is wretchedly expensive. A prison place costs more than a place at our top boarding schools. But whereas teenagers emerge from British boarding schools with arguably the best education on the planet, they can easily emerge from prisons with acquired drug addictions. At a time when our national debt is rising by £5,000 a second, mass jailing seems an unconscionable extravagance.
It is surely worth exploring more effective alternatives. A police superintendent in my constituency, for whom I have enormous respect, thinks that the key is to stop pretending that punishment and rehabilitation can be combined. He wants to give criminals a short stretch of hard labour, complete with bawling drill sergeants, the sole purpose of which would be to make the convict think: “I never want to come back here again”. Once the explicitly penal part of the sentence had been completed, the emphasis would be on imparting skills and equipping the prisoner for gainful employment, a process that would not require 24-hour incarceration except where justified on grounds of crime-prevention.
My friend Danny Kruger, who used to be David Cameron’s speechwriter, but gave up a brilliant political career in order to run a prison charity, has come to the view that jails would improve if they ceased to be a state monopoly. He wants churches, charities and, yes, businesses, to take over the business of making convicts less likely to reoffend. His logic is surely sound. Governments were hopeless at building cars, operating airlines, installing telephones. Why should they be any better at reforming scoundrels?
How’s this for an idea. The coalition has taken up Direct Democracy’s proposal to place local police constabularies under elected representatives. But the other half of our scheme was to put these local sheriffs in charge of pursuing criminals through the courts, as well as the streets. Let sheriffs set local sentencing guidelines, and let convicts serve their time as “guests” of the local sheriff. Once you forge a direct link between local tax rates and sentencing policy, you create downward pressure on costs.
There might be asymmetries in consequence: an intrinsic quality of localism. The Sheriff of Kent might decide that shoplifters should serve custodial sentences, while the Sheriff of Surrey favoured alternative penalties. One of two things would then happen. Either Kentish crooks (and crooks of Kent) would flood across the county border in such numbers that the people of Surrey elected a tougher sheriff. Or the people of Kent would get sick of funding the requisite number of prison places. At which point, their sheriff might decide on more imaginative solutions. He might, for example, decree that shoplifters should stand outside Bluewater with a placard saying “Shoplifter”. I don’t know what people would choose: that’s the essence of localism. But I do know one thing: best practice would quickly spread, as people found cheapest and most effective ways to cut crime.
So long and thanks for all the clicks
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