Justice Secretary Alex Norris claimed this week that fixing prison overcrowding will take a decade. He presented this as an ambitious statement, but it sounded more like a minister groping for a line from his boss’s political renewal program and applying it to a crisis he does not yet know how to solve.

Norris told LBC that Andy Burnham wanted “10-year solutions” and was working towards sustainable prison capacity 10 years ahead. That approach may work in a speech about long-term economic growth or infrastructure investment. It lands very differently, however, when applied to a prison system that repeatedly approaches the point at which justice for victims and public protection depends on whether there are vacant beds.

The Justice Secretary has argued that prison construction takes time. But that is time he doesn’t have. New establishments require land, planning consent, design, procurement, utilities, local infrastructure, security systems, staffing and years of construction. The previous government’s 20,000-place program, which promised delivery by the middle of this decade, showed the scale of the problem. The National Audit Office said the program would not be finished until 2031, about five years late, and could cost between £9.4 billion and £10.1 billion.

Previous Conservative administrations built their way out of trouble with new jails, only to wreck that progress by shutting down older ones. Now Labour has a justice secretary who treats another decade of likely crisis management as business as usual. The Ministry of Justice projects there will be around 94,700 people in custody by September next year. The National Audit Office had already concluded that the capacity program would leave a 12,400-place deficit by the end of 2027. The Government’s response has been to delay the moment of system failure by reducing time spent in custody and finding accommodation within the existing estate. But the crash-out point is now one year away.

That is how Britain has reached a situation where the Ministry of Justice is ludicrously proposing to convert laundries, offices, and cupboards into cells, with £110 million fast-tracked for this purpose. Prisons need office space because staff have to plan and manage regimes. They need workshops and activity areas because prisoners need structured time out of their cells. They need healthcare and interview rooms because custody creates acute physical and mental health needs. Every room taken from those functions has consequences for daily order. And there is no mention of how the extra officers needed to staff these cubbyholes will be found in a service hemorrhaging new recruits before they have finished their probation.

The available headroom is already perilously thin. Male prisons have operated at 98% of capacity, with around 1,500 places available. That means a relatively modest rise in the remand population, a major policing operation, delay to a construction project or a forecast error can produce another emergency.

Norris says he is ending the “doom loop” inherited from the Conservatives. Last month, he argued that the new progression model in legislation formalizing early release would bring “long-term security” to the estate. That certainly isn’t the case for victims. The first October tranche is expected to involve 1,350 prisoners, with a further 3,000 releases to follow. People serving less than 18 months are due to be released first; offenders sentenced to more than 12 years are due to enter the system from next June. Serious offenders, including perpetrators of domestic violence, will all benefit.

Prison release dates are now being directed by capacity management. Those released will be placed under the supervision of an already broken probation service that relies on the science-fiction capabilities of GPS ankle tags. Further serious offenses are inevitable.

Labour, faced with a genuine jail capacity crisis, has opted for a solution based on the ideological obsessions of the penal reform sector rather than the views of a public it requires to stay in power for anything like 10 years. Two years could have been spent on a national crisis effort to increase cell capacity and create the necessary breathing space for a strategic review of prison use. Crucially, it would have allowed the probation service to recover from years of underfunding and ideological vandalism, making community alternatives to prison realistic rather than merely expedient. Instead, it has been characterized by panic-driven, hugely unpopular tactical measures to push the point of collapse a few months further down the road.

There is little time left to solve this crisis. Worse, there is little evidence that Britain has the caliber of people in charge to do so.

---

Ian Acheson is a former prison governor and author of Screwed: Britain’s Prison Crisis and How To Escape it.

NotThatBigIan

---