Texas-style reforms won’t save our prisons

Texas. Big country, big ideas. The new Lord Chancellor and Justice Secretary Shabana Mahmood has become enamoured with an intriguing idea from the Lone Star state – letting prisoners out early for good behaviour.

Those of you who still watch reruns of Porridge on BritBox will be having déjà vu. Back before the Criminal Justice Act of 1991 ended it due to preference for a more risk-based approach, remission was a central feature of prisoners’ lives. Good behaviour could earn you days off your sentence up to one third of time you were due to serve. The penalty of misbehaviour was lost remission. The prison population in 1991 was about half what it is now.

Necessity, however, is the mother of invention. Over in Texas, that necessity was a system that had incarcerated north of 150,000 people and counting in bursting facilities. The majority of these prisoners were pre-trial detainees.