Jailhouse UK: Prison Expansion (feature)
01 November 1996
[FIGURES ONLY AVAILABLE IN PRINTED FORMAT]
In 1993 at the Conservative Party Conference Michael Howard attempted to regain the initiative from Labour on law and order and told his audience that "prison works" and left the courts with a clear political message that he wished to see far greater use of imprisonment as a method of punishment. In 1995 notwithstanding clear evidence that the courts were already sending more people to prison, he announced radical changes in sentencing policy.
"It's time to get honesty back into sentencing. Time to back the courts. And time to send a powerful message to the criminal." He then announced that there would no longer be automatic early release or release for good behaviour. In addition, he declared that there would be "no more half time sentences for full time crime" and proposed that people twice convicted of a serious violent or sexual offence would automatically receive a life sentence and that there should be a minimum sentence for burglars and dealers in hard drugs.
In June of this year the head of the Prison Service gave evidence before the House of Commons Home Affairs Select Committee and drew attention to the rapid rise in prison numbers. He asked the Home Secretary for an urgent ?115 million jail building programme pointing out that work would need to start straight away to produce places by the middle of 1997 when he thought that the prisons would be in difficulties. It was a clear challenge to the Home Secretary to provides the funds for his Prison Works's policy. In October Howard published the Crime Bill introducing his sentencing proposals and a number of other draconian policies (see Police Bill in this issue). At the same time he promised to build at least another 12 new private super-prisons - at the cost of an estimated #3 billion.
Since the Conservative Party came to power in 1979 it has built 22 new prisons and provided another 11,635 places. The 12 proposed new private prisons will provide an extra 11,000 places. This prison building programme contrasts sharply with the government's commitment to build new schools, hospitals and universities. Uniquely only prisons have had their physical capacity doubled in the period.
Prison numbers
Fig 1 shows the average daily prison population for England and Wales over the last 125 years. As can be seen the numbers in prison declined steadily from 1870 to after the First World War, remained fairly constant until after the Second World War and have been rising ever since. Britain is now imprisoning nearly double the number of people than in the 1870s.
These figures, however, take no account of changes in the size of the population. Fig 2 shows the average daily number per 100,000 of the population. As can be seen the overall trend is broadly similar but it shows even more clearly the decarceration which started in 1870s with the centralisation of local prisons and continued to just after the Second World War when the policy was put into reverse. Since then Britain has pursued a policy of increasing the proportion of its population who are incarcerated.
The Home Office makes regular attempts to predict the long term trends in the prison population taking account of a range of factors such as changes in the numbers brought before the court, the numbers found guilty, the length of sentences and the effects of changes in legislation. In 1995 using 1994 figures, it estimated that the population would be 52,000 in 1997 and 56,000 by 2002. These proved to be gross under-estimations. If the sentencing proposals in the Crime Bill are enacted, the numbers will increase even more rapidly and it is very probable that by the end of the century Britain will be incarcerating more people per head of population than at any time in its history.
European comparisons
The Council of Europe collates prison statistics for member countries. Fig 4 shows the incarceration rates for selected Western Europea