The Chancellor announced this morning that he will sell off old Victorian jails, which are on prime land for housing development, and replace them with a series of new prisons.
The decision to sell off old prisons is a relatively easy one to take. The old prison estate in London is worth a fortune, is expensive to maintain, and new prisons can be run more efficiently. What’s more, prison is notoriously bad at rehabilitating offenders and protecting the public – as nearly half of offenders go on to commit another crime within a year of being released.
The harder decision for the government is: what should replace the old prisons? Short-term economic interests would point towards building a series of large prisons in cheaper areas of the country – such as the new ‘Titan’ prison being built in Wrexham, which will house more than 2,000 inmates.
But the government should resist the temptation to go down this route, as it could be more expensive in the long run. Over the past 20 years there has been a tendency for prison numbers to rise with ever-larger prisons built to house them. Meanwhile reoffending rates have remained stubbornly high. As the Centre for Social Justice has shown, large prisons do not work. They create a ‘revolving door’ between offenders and prison, and perpetuate costs for the taxpayer.
Instead, the government should use this once-in-a-generation opportunity to rethink the way that prison works. In Scandinavia, they make much better use of smaller prisons, which are integrated with local job centres, education facilities and mental health services. This means that offenders can get their lives back on track, rather than being sent to large and distant prisons where they mix with harder criminals, which reduces opportunities for rehabilitation.
If this approach was applied in England, the government could sell off the majority of prison land in city centres, but retain a small amount for secure drug and mental health treatment centres, located in the communities they serve, and potentially funded by housing developers as part of their planning conditions.
The government should also use this opportunity to think about the way that sentencing works. Prisons are hugely expensive to run, regardless of the type of building they are housed in. While selling off the old prison estate will help save the government money on its capital budget, the only way to substantially bring down day-to-day ‘revenue’ costs is to cut the number of people who end up in prison in the first place.
Michael Gove’s recent visit to the US can be a source of inspiration here, where republicans are leading the charge on prison reform in order to save taxpayer money and ensure that the criminal justice system is more efficient. Judges in the US have achieved this by using community sentences and intensive rehabilitation programmes, accompanied by a ‘tough love’ approach to failure, where offenders who break the terms of their rehab programme are sent back to prison. This approach has been shown to be more effective at reducing reoffending and cheaper for the public purse.
The difficulty is that in England, courts and local authorities have little incentive or freedom to ensure that these alternatives to custody are made available. Magistrates are bound by national sentencing guidelines, and when an offender is sent to prison it means their costs are picked up by central government. That is why, in a report to be launched next month, IPPR will argue for city mayors and local authorities to have greater responsibility for reducing offending in their areas, giving them both the tools and the incentives to get the job done.
Selling off the old prison estate will only result in long-term savings to the taxpayer, and safer communities, if it is accompanied by wider reforms to the way that prisons and sentencing work.
Jonathan Clifton is Associate Director for Public Service Reform at IPPR. He can be found tweeting @jp_clifton
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