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UK: Controlling prison numbers?

01 September 2005

With the prison population hovering around the 77,000 mark, and more than 7,000 prisoners currently held two to a single cell, the Prison Service decided to re-roll HMP Buckley Hall as a mens' prison and thereby create 350 places for adult men. Home Secretary Charles Clarke told a September conference organised by the Prison Reform Trust that he intended to abandon plans to peg the prison population at 80,000. Clarke's speech was, for the most part simply re-stating the status quo, with references to "individualized support packages" for prisoners and "a contract between the criminal and the state where each individual in prison, on remand, or on probation is required to commit to a non-criminal future" and in return the state and its agencies should commit to providing whatever support it can to stopping their re-offending.

The 1999 Prison Rules already state that the purpose of the training and treatment of convicted prisoners should be to encourage and assist them to lead a good and useful life, and the Woolf Report proposed that all prisoners serving over 12 months should have a sentence plan, so Clarke's comments should be seen as an admission of failure to deliver on Woolf's agenda.

Given that Clarke explicitly linked prison schemes to reduce offending with access to work and a home, talked of extending work-related support packages to remand prisoners, and abandoned all talk of pegging prison numbers, the proposals amount to a package of prison expansion with training for low-paid, casual work at the heart of any sentence plan.

Prison Reform Trust