Govt told to close prisons

Thursday, 2 July 2009 12:00 AM

By Alex Stevenson

Closing prisons and ending central control of the penal system are among the radical proposals made today by Cherie Booth's prisons inquiry.

The Commission on English Prisons, with Ms Booth as president, has spent the last two years examining whether there are any alternatives to England's overcrowded prisons.

It concludes drastic cuts in prison numbers and shifting the focus from short custodial sentences to community-based punishments are the best response to Britain's "excessively harsh" criminal justice system.

"The final report should be a road-map for long-term and fundamental reform," Ms Booth said.

Cherie Booth tells politics.co.uk which party she thinks would do better on prisons reform:

Commission chairman David Wilson, professor of criminology at Birmingham City University, commented: "Since early in the 1990s, England and Wales has been set on a course towards becoming a jurisdiction which punishes excessively, harshly and with little attention paid to the relationship between legislation and the impact on prison numbers.

"The result is a crisis of overcrowding which threatens to bring the penal system to its knees.

"We now jail more of our population than almost any other country in western Europe, despite the fact that there is no evidence to say we are any more crime-prone than our neighbouring countries."

Today's report, Do Better Do Less, also calls for the dismantling of the National Offender Management Service.

It wants a shift from punishment to prevention, preferring funding to be directed towards investment in communities which currently produce prisoners.

And it proposes closer cooperation between the criminal justice, health and education sectors, with local authorities taking the lead.

"The Commission proposes that justice is more local," Ms Booth added. "Crucially, more widespread use of effective community sentences would both allow us to reduce the use of prison and allow for reinvestment of resources into local communities to cut offending."

During the question-and-answer session at the report's launch the commissioners were forced to defend their decision not to include any specific target figure for the prison population to fall to.

"There is a real danger in getting fixated with numbers," Ms Booth said, although commission member Ian Loader, professor of criminology at Oxford University, conceded a "tactical mistake" might have been made.

Politicians present at the launch indicated their broad interest in the report but were reluctant to commit to its principles wholeheartedly.

"What this report represents is the beginning of a dialogue," prisons minister Maria Eagle said.

"I'm very interested in some of the ideas which have been raised."

Shadow prisons minister Edward Garnier said the report made some "entirely worthwhile. recommendations" and added: "This is a document that should be on every policymaker's desk, and not left on the shelf."

Afterwards Ms Booth rejected politics.co.uk's suggestion that their comments were, essentially, meaningless.

"There is a consensus emerging, which is a very positive thing and I welcome that," she said.

"But it's not just about the politicians. It's also about the community and the media."

Frances Crook, director of the Howard League of Penal Reform which set up the commission, told politics.co.uk she expected to meet and talk with ministers more regularly.

"We have to be moderate in our approach to crime and the criminal justice system," she pressed.

"We have to release money from it because at the moment it's excessively expensive.

"We should be putting that money into local people's initiatives and that will make a safer society, reduce crime and have fewer people in prison. And that's a win-win for everybody."

Frances Crook sums up two years' hard work:

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