Sack Lord Falconer Now!

Or so the Sun says over the early release of prisoners.

Seasoned readers of this blog, or indeed followers of the rather obvious impending prison space crisis will think this is utter rubbish. For all his faults Cheerful Charlie is the man handed the "hospital ball", "hot potato" or any other metaphor you care to use. One thing is clear is that he is not the architect of the prison systems woes, that responsibility has to lie between various Home Secretaries, Gordon Brown and the editors of the tabloids.

Given that the editor of the Sun has to steer clear of Gordon Brown because Murdoch may want to support him, they set John Reid's agenda and they are not going to resign over their own failings then I suppose that only leaves the poor chap holding the baby!

Brown offers too little too late on Prisons

It seems that Gordon Brown is now offering more money for prison building. The problem is that this is too little and too late. The reality is that the Home Office predictions on prison numbers have been showing an impending crisis for years and not enough has been done to avert it.

There are two things that could have been done, one is build more prisons and the other is lock less people up. What we seem to be doing is the reverse of both.

This has two knock on effects. Firstly the prison service just does not have the capacity to rehabilitate people properly, because prisons are too crowded, resulting in more people being re convicted than would otherwise be the case. Secondly people are being held longer than the current rules would normally allow for because they can't complete specific courses they need to complete to get parole, or the probation service is in such chaos that it can't process the paperwork, leading to arbitrary imprisonment. Both these problems make the overcrowding issue worse, adding to the problem.

Now we hear that Lord Falconer is going to release prisoners early, again in a fairly arbitrary fashion, including prisoners who may have not been properly rehabilitated, which will damage the publics faith in the criminal justice system.

This is clearly the worst of all worlds. We have arguably either populist or correct sentencing policy not backed up with anything sensible leading to a reduction in the quality of the prison service and a reduction in public confidence at the same time. Gordon Brown has not been prepared to pay for his governments policy on prisons and sentencing.

Doesn't it just fill you with confidence that he takes over next week?

The BBC has this.

Home Office in crisis again. Can it get any worse?

Well, we have had all sorts of bad news about the Home Office in recent days. For example they are now in a panic over prison places, or rather the lack of them, (see here) that has now led to a man convicted of downloading child pornography getting off with out a prison sentence (See the BBC's article here). It seems that sentences are being set by the number of prison places.

A man who pleaded guilty to sexually assaulting a teenager has been released on bail. The judge said that last week he would have sent him straight to jail.

We now have the Rod Morgan, head of the Youth Justice Board resigning because the system is being "swamped" by minor offenders who would not have ended up in prison in the first place before 1997.

Why are we in this situation? Well, in short Labour have been talking very tough on crime, and sentencing but have not provided the prison places to back up the rhetoric. Whether or not the policy is a good one is another matter. If you want to send more people to prison for longer you do need more places.

Government has had advance notice of this looming crisis for years. However there is also a real problem in our system is that there is no time and space to rehabilitate people, particularly young offenders. We can't afford to have 10 year olds locked up in prison and not rehabilitated moving on to a life of crime. This is just very wrong and wasteful of future tax payers money.

We also have worsening crime figures as well. You are apparently more likely to be a victim of crime this year than last, the first rise since 1995. (See the BBC's article here)

Can it get worse? I think it can, we will have to wait and see.

Home Office in more crisis

You will no doubt have heard that John Reid the Home Secretary, Lord Falconer, the Lord Chancellor, and the Attorney General Lord Goldsmith have sent letters to magistrates and courts asking them not to lock up so many people. if you haven't you can read the BBC's article here and the Daily Mail here.

Well, this just smacks of incompetence and muddled thinking. For quite some time now convicted criminals have been getting longer sentences and prisons have been filling up. In fact a government study in 2000 predicted we would need 100,000 prison places by 2006. Well we only have 80,000.

Norwich prisons A wing, condemned and closed as unfit has had to be reopened for remand prisoners (these are people who may well be guilty of no crime, but seem to get the worst prison places).

This government has had plenty of warning that it is running out of places but has done nothing.

However the letter makes interesting reading. It points out that prisons are an expensive resource. They are. It says that only dangerous and persistent offenders should be locked up. I agree. However you can't have sentencing policy decided by the number of prison places. What about all the first time non dangerous offenders who were locked up last week? It is bizarre. What is more when you have a resource as expensive as prison, you must make sure it is doing it's job correctly which it can't do if they are too full.

The Prison over crowding fiasco II

In my last post on this subject here, I pointed out how this bunch had just sold off a prison ship, in August. I now see they are tendering to get another one. You just could not make this up. You can see the article from the BBC here.

I also note that they are allowing a sex offender to use gym facilities in schools on the grounds of human rights of the offender. That is of course complete tosh.

The Prison over crowding fiasco

It seems to have come as a bit of a surprise to the government that they are about to run out of prison places, so all sorts of things are being proposed.

The fact is the writing has been on the wall for years, and nothing has been done. No emergency places brought on line, in fact the prison ship in Weymouth has been shut down.

This is rank incompetence.

What is worse however is that no one in government has looked at dealing with the problem from the other direction which is to reduce offending rates, of which the easiest to deal with is re offending rates. After all you get to talk to a captive audience.

At the last general election the Conservatives proposed a massive increase in drug rehabilitation but inside and outside of prison. This would cost extra money, but could well have removed the need to build more prisons and house more prisoners, saving both government and the economy lots of money.

This government is just a useless clueless bunch of opportunists and idiots.