COUNTERBLAST:Ships Ahoy? What the New Coalition

Government Might Do WithPenal Policy

ANDREW NEILSONAssistant Director and Head of Public Affairs and Policy,

The Howard League for Penal Reform

In January 2010 it was reported that the Conservative Party was consideringbringing back prison ships in order to scrap the controversial early releasescheme operating in England and Wales, where prisoners serving less thanfour years for non-serious violent offences were automatically freed from jail18 days before the end of their sentence under the end of custody licenceregime. The policy, it was speculated, came not from the Conservative justiceteam but Andy Coulson, the party’s Director of Communications, and aformer editor of Sunday tabloid the News of the World (Syal 2010). In a pressconference subsequent to this speculation, the Conservative leader, DavidCameron, confirmed that prison ships were being considered if the partywon the general election, as he personally had ‘always believed prison shipsare a useful way of expanding capacity’ (Elliott 2010).

Whether or not Coulson was directly behind the Conservative Partyraising the spectre of prison ships, it is undoubtedly true that talk of the‘hulks’ plays well in certain tabloid newspapers. Indeed the Sun, the News ofthe World’s sister newspaper, has run an intermittent campaign to bringback prison ships, reporting in 2006 that the 400-foot Bibby Renaissance, asix-storey barge left disused in Barrow docks for eight years, could have‘room for 800 cons after being refitted for use as secure accommodation’(MacAdam 2006).

Prior to the prison ships stories in the press, Conservative penal policywas acknowledged to be in some disarray. The original Conservative policydocument Prisons with a Purpose was predicated on expanding prisoncapacity beyond the government’s own building programme by selling offold Victorian prisons to fund a further 5,000 prison places (ConservativeParty 2008). At the end of 2009, however, it was admitted by party officialsthat this would not be possible, as the recession would mean that Victorianprisons would only fetch ‘rock bottom prices’. The prisons minister, MariaEagle, accused David Cameron of a ‘huge U-turn’ (BBC online 2009).

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Bandying around prison ships as a possible solution was perhaps theobvious next step for a rattled Tory leadership.

If the talk of prison ships was a tilt at penal populism by the opposition,then it was countered by the Labour government ending the early releasescheme the following month. While welcoming the move in the House ofCommons, the Conservative’s then shadow Justice Secretary, DominicGrieve, rightly accused ministers of ‘acting out of political desperation’ byannouncing the move so close to an election campaign, pointing out thataccording to the government’s ‘own projections – taking account ofplanned increases in capacity – the prison population will still exceedoperational capacity by July 2011’ (House of Commons 2010).

This entire episode illustrates the paucity of mature political debate inWestminster, made worse by the unreal quality of proceedings as the countryawaited the general election. Such is the depth of the fiscal crisis, no leadingpolitician has been prepared to spell out the truly grim future the publicfinances face. We have heard of cuts of course: deep cuts, swift cuts, smart cuts,but with very little detail as to what exactly will be cut, and how. Instead theparties spent the election period dreaming up yet more headline-grabbinginitiatives, as if headline-grabbing initiatives were remotely affordableanymore.

Still, there must be some thinking going on behind closed doors,particularly now we have the rather unexpected electoral outcome of aConservative and Liberal Democrat coalition. For the Conservatives, theexample of Canada has apparently been instructive. When the Chretiengovernment came to power in Canada in 1993 it faced the need to reduce a$42 billion deficit. This was achieved by successfully delivering cuts of 20% topublic spending, and last year the media reported that the Conservative Partywas looking to learn from the Canadian experience if it takes power (Oliver,Oakeshott and Smith 2009). Perhaps Canada also has something to teach theConservatives and their Lib Dem coalition partners on how to reconcile apenal policy that has been based on spiralling prison numbers with the fiscalreality of reducing a dramatic deficit.

Supporting Dominic Grieve’s assertion that prison numbers areprojected to continue rising above capacity, one recent report on theprisons crisis pointed out that this ever-increasing prison populationshould be viewed against the background that even before we face the cutsto come the Ministry of Justice is already expected to make d1.3 billion insavings by 2012 (Justice Select Committee 2010). New prisons are beingbuilt using the private finance initiative, which effectively racks up furtherpublic sector debt over the years to come – hardly prudent given the debtthe country has already amassed in bailing out the banks. For all the moneybeing spent on incarceration, reoffending rates for those leaving prisonremain stubbornly high. If a coalition government is serious aboutdelivering radical budget cuts, then penal policy, just as with every otheraspect of public spending, cannot escape some scrutiny.

The Canadian approach to a penal and fiscal crisis combined is bound tobe salutary. The 1995 budget which began the Canadian government’sprogramme to reduce public spending explicitly stated that the country

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could no longer afford to sustain its rising prison population. As part of theoverall strategy to reduce the deficit, Canadian justice officials were askedto find ways to reform the Canadian prison system and reduce numbers.The Canadians duly reduced their prison population by 11% between1995 and 2004 (Prison Service News 2008).

This was managed with a number of measures, including the introduc-tion of a ‘restraint principle’ in their criminal code, which explicitly statedthat individuals should not be incarcerated if there were other reasonablealternatives available. Conditional sentences served in the community, anexpansion of restorative justice programmes and a speeding up of the paroleprocess were among the many policies introduced to reduce the prisonpopulation (Canadian Criminal Justice Association 2006).

Crucially, these reforms did not see crime rates rise. Canadian crimerates reached their lowest for 25 years and between 1991 and 1999 therewere drops ranging from 23% for assault and robbery to 43% for homicide(Ouimet 2004).

The Canadian reforms may not be entirely replicable in this country,while an initiative such as the conditional sentence has already beenadopted in England and Wales, although with a key difference that hasarguably compromised the effectiveness of the disposal. Whereas thesuspended sentence introduced through the Criminal Justice Act 2003 seesEnglish and Welsh courts suspending the sentencing itself, in favour ofcommunity supervision, in Canada the courts do sentence individuals toprison – but the sentence is served in the community unless conditions arebreached. Given that the Canadian conditional sentence is, therefore,technically a prison sentence, it comes under the restraint principle writteninto their criminal code, and this has, in part, allowed the Canadians toavoid the net-widening which has bedevilled the suspended sentence inEngland and Wales (Roberts and Gabor 2004).

One could find such examples of technocratic nuance around the globe, ofcourse. The primary lesson of the Canadian experience is simply that a fiscalcrisis can create the space for a sensible strategy of decarceration. This was theargument put forward by the Commission on English Prisons Today, in theirreport Do Better Do Less (Howard League 2009). After all, a comprehensiveapproach to reducing public spending cannot simply be delivered by furtherefficiency savings and salary freezes. Choices will have to be made, which willbe novel to a political establishment which has often preferred to use benigneconomic conditions as cover for shirking difficult decisions. A recognitionthat something must change has coalesced around a platform of penal reformbased on localism and the justice reinvestment espoused by the Commissionand the Justice Select Committee in their respective reports. To what extentthis platform is embraced by the new coalition remains to be seen, and willlikely depend on the enthusiasm of new Justice Secreatary, Ken Clarke, forfresh ideas.

The fear is that the coalition makes the wrong choices. Furthermisconceived attempts at marketising criminal justice may see thefinal gutting out of the probation service, while the good intentionsof the voluntary sector are warped beyond all recognition as more

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quasi-governmental service providers drive local charities and campaigngroups to the wall. Faced with the perilous state of the Treasury finances,the Ministry of Justice might find some way of expanding prison capacityon the cheap, with outsourced and inadequate custodial provision that willleave prisoners, staff and society as a whole, unsafe.

Such a bleak future may not involve prison ships, but the course acoalition government must navigate is most certainly littered with enoughreefs of grassroot opinion, whirlpools of media outrage and wrecks ofpolicy mistakes past, that hopes for a swing away from the penal populismof recent decades should remain just that. Hopes.

References

BBC online (2009) ‘Tories accused of U-turn on prisons places pledge’, BBC News,2 December. Available at: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/8392027.stm (accessed27 February 2010).

Canadian Criminal Justice Association (2006) Position Paper: C-9 Conditional Sentencing.Available at: http://www.ccja-acjp.ca/en/c9en.html (accessed 27 February 2010).

Conservative Party (2008) Prisons with a Purpose, London: Conservative Party.Elliott, F. (2010) ‘David Cameron throws weight behind prison ships’, The Times,

26 January. Available at: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article7001607.ece(accessed 27 February 2010).

House of Commons (2010) Hansard. Official Reports: Parliamentary Debates, 22February. Available at: http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200910/cmhansrd/cm100222/debtext/100222-0005.htm (accessed 27 February 2010).

Howard League (2009) Do Better Do Less: The Report of the Commission on English PrisonsToday, London: The Howard League for Penal Reform.

Justice Select Committee (2010) Cutting Crime: The Case for Justice Reinvestment,London: House of Commons.

MacAdam, H. (2006) ‘Is this the first prison ship?’, Sun, 28 October. Available at: http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/article68964.ece (accessed 27 February 2010).

Oliver, J., Oakeshott, I. and Smith, D. (2009) ‘Whitehall lines up ‘‘doomsday’’cutbacks’, Sunday Times, 5 July. Available at: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article6638323.ece (accessed 27 February 2010).

Ouimet, M. (2004) ‘Explaining the American and Canadian crime drop in the 1990’s’,Champ penal/Penal field, nouvelle revue internationale de criminologie [En ligne], 1.Available at: http://champpenal.revues.org/448 (accessed 27 February 2010).

Prison Service News (2008) ‘Canada’s success story: how Canada cut both its prisonpopulation and crime’, Prison Service News, 260, 30–1.

Roberts, J. and Gabor, T. (2004) ‘Living in the shadow of prison: lessons from theCanadian experience in decarceration’, British Journal of Criminology, 44, 92–112.

Syal, R. (2010) ‘Prison ship policy shock splits Tories’, Observer, 24 January. Availableat: http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/jan/24/prison-ship-row-splits-conservatives (ac-cessed 27 February 2010).

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