How Labour should reform Britain’s overstuffed prisons

BRITISH PRISONS are bursting. The new Labour government has been told that space is so scarce that prisons could start turning away new inmates within weeks; to free up cells, some offenders will be released after serving 40% of their sentence, rather than 50% as normal. Some of the blame for this crunch lies with the previous government: the Tories ducked taking more emergency measures to alleviate overcrowding. But the trouble in Britain’s prisons dates back decades, bears the fingerprints of both main parties and reflects the fraught politics of law and order.

Since the 1990s both the Conservatives and Labour have vied to take ever-tougher stances on crime. The range of crimes that result in prison time has widened; sentences have lengthened. Britain is not as obsessed with incarceration as America. But its prison population is easily the largest in western Europe; it locks up roughly twice as many people per head as the Netherlands and Germany. If “prison works”, in the influential phrase of Michael Howard, a former home secretary, Britain should be basking in the benefits. It is true that crime has fallen since the 1990s but that has happened in nearly all rich countries. Governments are loth to spend scarce money on making prisons less wretched. Britain’s reoffending rate is among the highest in the rich world.