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September 02, 2008
Editorial: UK: Let the penal reformers build jails
Let the penal reformers build jails
02/09/2008
Telegraph (UK)
In truth, the prison reform group Nacro has never been much in favour of building new jails.
Over the years, the organisation has sought to rebrand itself from a do-gooder outfit known as the National Association for the Care and Rehabilitation of Offenders, preferring to describe itself as a ‘crime reduction charity’.
It has been consistently critical of the criminal justice policies of successive governments, not least because they have pushed the prison population up from around 50,000 in the mid-1990s to more than 80,000 today.
Nacro has argued that many in jail should not be there. Its decision, then, to join a consortium of private bidders seeking a contract to operate new prisons is of more than passing interest.
Together with a private security firm, a construction company and a drugs charity, it wants to run two 600-bed prisons in Merseyside and London. This is a good idea on two levels. Firstly, a penal reform pressure group is acknowledging that more prisons are needed. This Government has been negligent, to say the least, in not providing the jails that it knew longer and tougher sentences would require.
Secondly, it allows a group like Nacro to become directly involved in running an institution - putting its money where its mouth is.
Nacro believes that if it is involved from the beginning, the chances are greater of developing a regime that helps reduce re-offending.
The group is right to identify the importance of this matter.
The punishment for prisoners is to be deprived their liberty. While they are in jail it does nobody any good to spurn the opportunity offered by a literally captive audience to release them back into the community equipped with a qualification or skill that will help them get work and may stop them re-offending.
Reconviction rates remain horrendous, with 70 per cent of young offenders, and more than 50 per cent of adults, back in court within two years.
The Government’s plan to build huge 2,500-bed Titan jails may be an answer to overcrowding, but it will be of questionable value to the improvement of rehabilitation and ending the spiral of crime, which should sensibly be the goal of any government’s penal policy.
There is always a danger that letting a penal reform lobby group run a prison is inviting the inmates to take over the asylum.
But Nacro should be given a chance to see if its prescriptions work in practice.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2008/09/02/dl0204
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Posted by lois at September 2, 2008 09:43 PM