Julian Stern (oD): One issue unlikley to have been on Gordon Brown's and Nicolas Sarkozy's agenda last week was prison construction - but it might have been useful if it was. A recent BBC report has suggested the advice from the governor of Europe's largest prison, near Paris, would be simple: don't build big prisons. But that is exactly the road the government is going down, thanks to a recommendation for three so-called Titan prisons put forward in Lord Carter's review on the future use of custody in England & Wales in December.
Building larger penal institutions may in fact undermine what the UK government says it wants to achieve - public confidence in the justice system. Justice minister Jack Straw called for a "community justice coalition", at the launch of the RSA's Prison Learning Network last week. While Lord Carter said that building the large prisons would be an efficient way to 'build out' inefficient and decrepit prison capacity, in his speech Jack Straw focused mainly on cost, saying:
building one large establishment is cheaper than a number of smaller establishments. The planning permission process is the same whatever the size of the prison
So, despite wanting to bring justice closer to communities, the sheer urgency of increasing prison capacity and the need to deal with rotten existing buildings will bring about vast institutions that fly in the face of what experts say works best. As the UK's Chief Inspector of Prisons Anne Owers noted quite plainly in her 2006/7 annual report, small prisons work better than large ones.
Most commentators, including the Conservative opposition (who talked recently about a "rehabilitation revolution") agree on the importance of the continued expansion of rehabilitation and education to help reduce re-offending. Jack Straw says that education, training and other support will be more easily managed and organised in large-scale prisons. But scale can also mean further dislocation from communities.
Increasing prison capacity is unsustainable, though probably inevitable in the short term. In the US, with 1 in 100 adults now behind bars, a recent report from the Pew Centre concluded grimly that "expanding prisons will accomplish less and cost more than it has in the past."
So, how to achieve a genuine "community justice coalition" where citizens have a realistic understanding of crime figures (which overall have gone down sharply in recent years) and do not simply bay for more locking up? Lord Carter's report quotes some polls in 2007: 65% of the public continue to believe that crime is increasing across the country as a whole; 79% feel that sentence lengths should not be shortened; and 57% feel that the number of people sent to prison should not be reduced.
Meanwhile, the former chief inspector for prisons David Ramsbotham has called for the reorganisation of prisons into community or regional clusters, so that regions could take a closer interest in the success of rehabilitation measures. Jack Straw says "the public," when given the chance to learn more about how the justice machinery works, can come up with "measured," sensible decisions, and gain confidence in the justice system. But are 2,000-place institutions really the best way to move that foward?
