UK: A penal third way?
01 January 2002
On 4 February 2002, at the Prison Service's annual conference David Blunkett, the Home Secretary, announced a series of proposals which The Guardian was moved to call "a politically bold and admirable move" and widely seen by commentators as a break with the strategy of his two predecessors, Jack Straw and Michael Howard - by ditching of the "prison works" philosophy. Under Howard and Straw, prison numbers rose by more than 50% - from 40,000 to 65,000. Some 26 new prisons were built in a ten year period - 17 of them are now overcrowded. Douglas Hurd, another former Conservative Home Secretary, has commented that under such conditions, "prison becomes an expensive way of making bad people worse." After Blunkett's speech the Prison Governors' Association indicated their enthusiastic support.
Blunkett's proposal is far from detailed, but it is clear that he aims to remove short-term prisoners from the system - a "third way" between community programmes and prison. Various ideas are under consideration; intermittent custody (part community, part prison) a new intermediate sentence (special open prisons or hostels) or "custody minus" (a suspended sentence under which offenders complete a community programme). The enthusiasm for the proposals left some prison reform campaigners wondering if the enthusiasts had heard all of the speech, with its proposals for "harsher sentences and stricter supervision" for violent and sex offenders hardly a break from the "prison works" strategy.
Moreover, the new proposals do not abandon the strategy set out in the 2001 pre-election "Criminal Justice - The Way Ahead" document. This made explicit the link between the refusal of low paid work and crime and the need for short sentences to be tied into a "Jail to Work" scheme which allowed private contractors to set up prison workshops where inmates would earn less than the minimum wage with the possibility of a minimum wage job guaranteed on release. So far as the Home Office were concerned at this stage - crime was caused by the reluctance of the poor to do low paid work and the point of jail was to discipline them to do so. As David Blunkett's speech makes clear, the main attraction of the notion of "intermittent" custody is that "offenders are free to work in the week" and, after all, "prison is an expensive way of denying people liberty." What is most likely to be on offer is a variation of "Jail To Work" with hostels and special open prisons becoming workhouses for the new poor. David Blunkett is clear on this: "I am interested in creating special open prisons and hostels which would deny liberty but allow offenders to work,...learn new skills." The penal third way appears to be, as a spokesperson for Miscarriages of Justice UK put it, "Jail To Work without the cost to the state of imprisonment, and an addition to the range of penal options not a limit to it."
Observer 3.2.02; Guardian 4.2.02; Howard League, Miscarriages of Justice UK.