I spent years talking to people like Darren. Over a beer. In interview rooms. In the back of police cars. I’ve listened to criminals having hair-raisingly candid conversations, courtesy of the listening devices we planted in their houses. I also remember doing the occasional “gate arrest” at Wormwood Scrubs. These occur when an inmate’s wanted by another force and arrested immediately upon release — sometimes without the prisoner’s prior knowledge. Our man, having just finished a six-stretch, gazed longingly at the pub at the end of Du Cane Road. It was a traditional stop for newly-released cons to enjoy a pint. Then he clocked us getting out of our unmarked car. You’ve never seen true misery etched on a man’s face until you’ve done a gate arrest. So, yes, Darren the informant was being honest: I know how much criminals hate prison.

Which is why I chuckled when I read David Gauke’s entirely predictable prison Sentencing Review. Gauke, a Mayite Tory of the wettest kind, proposes a package of reforms aimed at creating prison spaces through — you guessed it — a brace of early release schemes. He also suggests sentences of less than a year be scrapped entirely. Gauke proposes to reform community punishment via vague promises of “technological progress” (despite Serco being fined for failing to tag prisoners) and investment in the probation service. It’s the usual bromides from the militant wing of the penal reform establishment. This lobby has informed prison policy for decades, and only ever fails upwards.

There’s one shiny policy in the report, clearly added to distract journalists and commentators: the voluntary chemical castration of sex offenders. This is a good idea, but it doesn’t mitigate releasing every other flavor of criminal too. This is, Darren told me, because they don’t care about non-custodial sentences. They really, genuinely don’t. Probation? Please. The probation service refuses to accept that any criminal is beyond rehabilitation. For them, the word “recidivist” simply doesn’t exist. This isn’t an ex-policeman’s bias; I’ve had the policy explained to me by a senior probation officer. “What about serial rapists?” I asked her. She gritted her teeth and repeated the party line. “Nobody is beyond rehabilitation.” It was like talking to a cultist.

More from this author

Surrey cokeheads are lining up chaos

By Dominic Adler

Criminals are acutely aware of this orthodoxy and, if they can be bothered to make appointments (online, of course), they’ll tell their well-meaning probation officer exactly what they need to hear. Then it’s off to the pub to sell drugs, or indulge in a spot of consequence-free shoplifting. This is part of the wider problem with prison reform, which Gauke’s recommendations typify: the Government wants to save money while displaying a socially liberal distaste for incarceration. It’s not that the lanyard classes don’t accept the necessity of prison, but only consider it an extreme sanction. For them, it’s something reserved for the worst types of criminals (or people who post idiotic but politically forbidden posts on social media).

Yet on sentencing, Gauke is catastrophically wrong. Whatever he claims, short sentences really do have a role to play. Offenders given, say, a six-month term will already have a lengthy criminal record. It’s a circuit breaker. But if short sentences have limited efficacy in terms of reoffending, but what about the victims of crime, the communities blighted by recidivist offenders?

I once worked on a west London council estate. One of our regulars was a 19 year old given to criminal damage, robbery and stealing cars. He was violent, clever and sly, often targeting elderly women for their pension money. You won’t be even remotely surprised to learn he later became a prominent gang member, dealing in drugs and firearms. Even the “dogs on the street”, as they say in Belfast, knew this was his career trajectory, and no earnest probation officer was going to stop him from fulfilling his potential. As police officers, we made it our mission to put the teenager in prison. He was gone for six months, during which time the estate felt palpably different. The crime rate also dropped significantly. This was due to a single kid, who required a lengthy criminal record (and hundreds of hours of police time) before a court was prepared to send him to Feltham.

Suggested reading

The case for the death penalty

By Peter Hitchens

So no, my concern wasn’t for the offender — it was for his victims. I’ve seen how locking up vicious, antisocial offenders offers respite. What about them, Mr Gauke? Not that we should really be surprised. The British criminal justice system is like a crumbling house with the world’s worst plumbing. The police, inexperienced and badly led, are meant to see their role as protecting the law abiding from criminals. They’re pumped, via leaky pipes, into the courts. The courts, run by lawyers paid by the hour, tend to endlessly re-route the u-bend. The courts feed into the prison service, who view their role as keeping a lid on the madhouse until their charges are released on license. This feeds, via a septic tank, into the probation service, charged with the Herculean task of reintegration and mentoring.

Punishment, in this context, is conspicuous by its absence. Again, criminals know this, even if David Gauke doesn’t. Unlike criminal justice, the criminal mindset is about results not process. It’s clever. It views rules merely as weaknesses to be gamed. Any half-decent criminal would run rings around the millionaires on Dragon’s Den. They understand how drug markets work, how to safely fence a stolen Land Rover. They can run multi-platform retail fraud schemes. They’re fully equipped to exploit a criminal justice system designed by David Gauke.

As for the prisons themselves? As an anticorruption investigator, I saw how the prison service was unremittingly hostile from an intelligence perspective. More than a few of our cases involved prison officers assisting offenders. The prison service, like the police, was hollowed out by austerity. Experienced officers left, replaced by a younger and more impressionable cohort. The recent case of Keri Pegg is instructive. Pegg, who joined the Prison Service as a graduate entrant, was made governor in only six years. She’s now a prisoner herself, after being caught having an affair with a major drug dealer. As part of her defense, she stated how her “progressive approach” upset senior prison service figures. Quite. My team once ran a surveillance operation on a prison to track a target visiting an inmate. We ran our plan via a police prison liaison officer to explore opportunities for assistance. “No way,” came the reply. “The screws control heroin distribution inside, so they monitor the carparks for potential police activity. I’d stay well clear.” As I said, the criminal justice system is a badly plumbed house, and the septic tank leaks everywhere.

Then there’s rehabilitation. Yes, it can rebuild their lives, but it’s still a roll of the dice, in more ways than one given the expense required. Criminal lifestyles are exactly that: lifestyles. Counseling or learning a new skill are unlikely to persuade career criminals to work a nine-to-five like everyone else. It may be uncomfortable to say: but there are too many criminals for whom “rehabilitation” as currently constituted is unlikely to work. Yet, as we have seen, that’s taboo across Whitehall and beyond.

Are there alternatives? Possibly. It would require intrusive intervention and lifestyle management around work, accommodation and healthcare. But even if that worked, and that’s by no means guaranteed, you’re still left with a massive bill at the end — to the point where you risk rewarding those who break the law, to the millions detriment of taxpayers who don’t. The report mentions one possible sanction with teeth: fines and restrictions on travel and driving. Yet sanctions must also come with the means to enforce them, and be in no doubt: this work will fall to over-stretched police officers.

And anyway, not even the good ideas really deal with what I call the “spectrum” of criminality. After all, the very term “criminal” is pejorative. The British criminal justice establishment tends to fixate on socially troubled people as opposed to career criminals. These are people who habitually find themselves in court for minor offenses and are, eventually, jailed. They might be homeless and often suffer from mental health or dependency issues. Or they might just be listless and foolish. There’s excellent work being done with these kinds of offenders by charities, who I don’t see mentioned in this review, who offer common-sense solutions like skills and training mentoring, as well as treatment for dependency issues. Prison isn’t the most suitable place for many “accidental” criminals with chaotic lifestyles to put their lives back on track — though sometimes establishment sympathy bleeds into excuse-making. Where is the line between personal and societal failure? And where does protecting the public fit in?

To me, the Government appears to have conflated two problems — “accidental” and career criminals — yet proscribed a single solution. This is a mistake. Sometimes, the only tool available to police to take a criminal out of circulation is a provable offense carrying a short sentence. These, under Gauke’s proposals, will no longer exist. The career criminal I mentioned earlier, that granny-robbing future gangster? He’d be at home, playing his Xbox and waiting to slip off his tag.

And so the Government will shave money off of the prison budget, no doubt to ameliorate Labour’s backbench insurgency over benefits. Carefully gamed, the inevitable spike in crime figures caused by releasing thousands of criminals early, aided and abetted by ineffective police performance, will hopefully be forgotten by the next election. In fact, I suspect the next prison review, written by a “Blue Labour” figure with more traditional views, will duly arrive by about 2028. It’s just a shame that our political class only ever seems to listen to people like David Gauke.

Albutt blasted their populist gimmicks, short-term stunts, botched spending cuts and the revolving door of 11 justice secretaries since the Tories took office in 2010, who “achieved nothing but decline” in the functioning of her sector. Her conclusion to the all-party group on penal affairs was stark: that politicians are failing inmates, staff and the wider public as they cram more and more people into “warehouses of despair, danger and degradation”.

It was a startlingly honest appraisal of how inadequate politicians played tribal games at the expense of a public service. As she ran through the failures of individual ministers, the Tories were, inevitably, at the receiving end. Yet she was scathing, too, about the Imprisonment for Public Protection regime, a callous legacy of New Labour that has left people with comparatively short sentences still behind bars 20 years later, despite the ditching of the policy more than a decade ago.

The core issue behind Albutt’s outburst is the soaring prison population, which has doubled since she was born 56 years ago. Our incarceration rates became the highest in Western Europe before the turn of the century, then kept on rising. Now we have 87,063 prisoners in England and Wales — and are predicted to hit 100,000 by the end of this decade. Each inmate costs an average of £47,000 a year, slightly more than the fees for Eton. Yet Albutt accused politicians of deceiving the public by promoting a myth that locking up more and more people for steadily longer terms makes society safer. “It’s a lie,” she said bluntly. “Prison does not work.”

Few voters really care about prisons, of course, nor will they shed any tears for convicts crammed into squalid cells. But we should heed Albutt’s warning as crime rises up the political agenda, both parties viewing it as an issue that could sway key voters in swing seats. The Government just delivered a raft of law and order pledges in its ‘crime week’, the latest in a series of dismal themed policy drives in a bid to win back support. Labour responded that ministers have lost control — a point underlined by the home secretary’s suggestion that police might like to tackle offences such as bike thefts and burglaries.

Yet while these politicians tussle to look tough, prisons expose how our democracy is floundering.  Sir Winston Churchill, who spent time in captivity during the Boer War, said treatment of criminals “is one of the most unfailing tests of the civilisation of any country”. He argued forcefully against excessive use of sentencing, warning that it was hard to rehabilitate jailed convicts. He told the Commons during his brief time as home secretary “the first real principle which should guide anyone trying to establish a good system of prisons should be to prevent as many people as possible getting there at all”.

Westminster has failed to heed this advice. New Labour passed 28 criminal justice bills and put one new offence on the statute book for every day they were in office over 13 years. Then the Tories ramped up sentencing so that the average length of a prison sentence increased by 55% over the past decade. Austerity forced the police to spend more time picking up pieces of other crumbling public services such as mental health and social care, while the percentage of crimes leading to a charge crashed. Only days after Albutt spoke to parliament, the Met Police chief Mark Rowley said his officers would no longer attend mental health emergencies.

But these problems run deep in our society. We know, for instance, that many prisoners come from broken families or chaotic backgrounds. We know they often struggle with issues such as addiction, autism, illiteracy, mental illness or learning disabilities. The House of Commons Justice Committee found seven in 10 prisoners may have mental health needs and that these can worsen behind bars: these MPs admitted prison can be “inappropriate” and “inhumane” for those with most severe psychological problems.

More from this author

Inside Britain's psychiatric nightmare

By Ian Birrell

Nor does this swamped, unloved system curb reoffending. Short sentences are especially damaging with 55% of those locked up for less than 12 months reoffending. During his stint as prisons minister, Rory Stewart dared to admit: “The best way of protecting the public is to significantly reduce, if not eliminate, the under 12-month prison population, because people on community sentences are less likely to re-offend than people put in prison.” Yet only Scotland has introduced a presumption against use of such sentences.

If rehabilitation doesn’t work, how about deterrence? This was exposed as another myth by the Sentencing Council of England and Wales, which published a landmark review last year. The authors pointed out that few offenders knew much about sentencing policies while criminal acts tend to be spontaneous, often driven by anger, drink, drugs, or mental health episodes. “We note that some have argued it is time to accept that sentence severity has no effect on the level of crime in society,” the study concludes drily.

These findings reinforce those of the Transform Justice think tank, which looked at assaults on health workers and police officers. Despite the penalty for these nasty crimes quadrupling over four years,, the number of recorded offences actually rose. “Most victims want the person who harmed them not to harm them or other people again,” said director Penelope Gibbs. “They don’t necessarily want their day in court or retribution. Unfortunately, more prison is unlikely to meet the needs of victims or reduce crime. A government that really cared about cutting crime, rather than simply winning headlines would reduce imprisonment.”

In the United States, even many conservatives have come to see that it makes no sense to keep locking up damaged citizens, whether on fiscal, redemptive, or simply criminal justice terms.  The “Right-on-Crime” movement, placing an emphasis on rehabilitation over punishment, started out in Texas before sweeping the Republican Party after both main parties agreed that locking up more and more people was a costly failure. This goes to show that even in such a divided country politicians can reach across the tribal chasm and shift the terms of public debate, leading to a dramatic 25% decline in prison populations since 2009.

Suggested reading

The murder trial that broke me

By Julie Bindel

As US advocates of reform have pointed out to me, it is far tougher to force people to change errant behaviour than simply to slam them into crowded cells. But Labour — driven again by Blairites — senses Tory vulnerability on crime and has stolen a lead on this issue in polls. The Tories by contrast think voters can be persuaded Labour is “soft” on crime under a former director of public prosecutions while latching onto an issue that unites both traditional Tories and new Red Wall recruits .

What makes this even more depressing is that an alternative approach has been proven to work in a nearby nation. Norway had even worse recidivism rates than Britain three decades ago, with seven in 10 prisoners reoffending within two years of release. It had a justice system like our own: built on the concept of deterrence with offenders given long sentences in grim institutions. But instead of blundering on with failure, their leaders boldly switched course. They were rewarded with the world’s lowest recidivism rate, which sees only one in five prisoners reoffending.

The key was to focus less on revenge and more on rehabilitation. Offenders lose their liberty but are given the chance to change their lives. Prisons tend to be small to break up violent cultures and dotted around the country to keep inmates close to their families. Cells are basic but have televisions, computers, fridges, and showers. They offer facilities such as yoga, saunas, music studios, tanning beds, fitness rooms, car workshops and cooking classes. Guards and prisoners enjoy barbecues and play sport together — and in some units, up to half the officers are women. Above all, there is an emphasis on study and work to develop skills in preparation for freedom — not abandonment in overcrowded cells.

Halden Prison, set in a forest 60 miles south of Oslo, has been labelled the most humane prison in the world although it is a maximum-security institution holding 250 men convicted of the worst crimes. It cost £138 million to build, winning a design award for its minimalist style and efforts to minimise stress. Inmates have appeared on reality television shows and released music under the label Criminal Records. There are no guns or barbed wire on display — although prisoners are still locked up in their rooms at night.

The legacy of such intense focus on rehabilitation is that Norway now has fewer than half the number of prisoners per capita as Britain. But Norway’s strategy is not just about treating prisoners well: it is about keeping people out of prison as far as possible. During its period of reform, prison sentences were reduced. Life sentences were abandoned with a 21 year maximum — although this can be extended in five-year increments if there is perceived danger.

Although the average cost per head of such prisons is significantly higher than our own, it is estimated that rehabilitated offenders save the state about £110,000 per person in terms of law enforcement costs and lower benefits. Crime comparisons are hard given differences in data collection, but the European Crime Index puts Norway comfortably in the top half of safest nations while the UK comes close to the bottom, just above Italy, Sweden and Belarus. Yet our leaders refuse to shift path, spending an immense £3.8bn to push another 20,000 people into more of these “warehouses of despair, danger and degredation”.

This failure by Westminster has a catastrophic impact on the rest of society. Politicians need to display some courage and admit that our prison system does not work, does not deter crime and does not provide value for money. “It’s really very simple,” said one prison warden in Norway. “Treat people like dirt and they’ll be dirt. Treat them like human beings and they’ll act like human beings.”

Perhaps we have progressed less than we like to think over the ensuing centuries. Our prisons currently hold more people than those elsewhere in Western Europe. The Netherlands, among other nations, has found that big reductions in incarceration rates makes little difference to crime levels, while freeing up more cash to challenge underlying social problems.

On his trips, Howard discovered prisoners cooped in cells all day; today, many are still locked up almost round the clock. His legacy led to pioneering prison legislation and building of hygienic new units with single cells — yet now many inmates must still eat, sleep and defecate confined in cramped, shared rooms.

Suggested reading

Life on the inside

By Elizabeth Oldfield

Our prisons are a national disgrace. We have a motley collection of 135 institutions crowded with often-damaged individuals who are being warehoused, either temporarily or permanently, out of sight from the rest of us. Many inmates have chaotic backgrounds, mental health conditions or learning disabilities. Most are detained for non-violent offences. Yet they are stuffed in places where violence is rife, drug use routine, suicide rates rising and self-harm running at horrific levels. Few of their fellow citizens seem to care what goes on behind the barbed wire and high walls, yet even the chief inspector of prisons warns they have “appalling living conditions” and “lack access to meaningful rehabilitative activity”.

Now there is fresh focus on the prison system after another terrorist attack — and this time by a jihadist fanatic who exploited efforts to help offenders back into the community. Usman Khan was freed under licence a year ago, seven years into a jail term for joining a bomb plot. He killed two young Cambridge graduates, Saskia Jones and Jack Merritt, who were filled with benevolent compassion for those less fortunate and attending an event run by a prison-based education project.

To underscore the complexities of these issues, those who thwarted Khan with such bravery included a man guilty of the most sickening murder of a young disabled woman, who was out on day release. “He is not a hero,” said one relative of the victim.

Most politicians know prison does not work, except as cruel punishment, given that recidivism rates run at almost 50% after one year — a rate significantly worse than in those nations which incarcerate fewer and focus instead on fixing distresses that can drive people to crime. Obviously the public must be kept safe, but a succession of Tory justice ministers have admitted that our wider incarceration policies have failed; one even said the system has become an unsustainable waste of money. Yet despite the prison population running at near-record levels, Boris Johnson has reverted to the jaded old narrative of trying to look tough on crime and demanding even more people are locked up in this atrocious system — as seen again of the weekend.

Suggested reading

Our politics of impossible promises

By Polly Mackenzie

So the Conservative election manifesto may be slim, but it still finds room for a barrage of populist stunts on law and order. Prominent among them is the creation of another 10,000 prison places, frittering away billions to add another 12% to prison capacity. There will be life without parole for child murderers, which takes away a judge’s ability to show the slightest mercy for, say, a severely depressed mother who kills her baby. There is a pledge to double maximum sentences for assaults on workers in the emergency services, although it is only 14 months since the last doubling of punishment for this offence. More stop and search, fresh action on knife crime (although prison sentences for possession have doubled in length over a decade) and yes, even that hoary old chestnut of ‘tougher’ community sentences.

This all smacks of sad throwback to the days of Tony Blair, whose desperation to shore up his right flank led to the absurdity of 28 criminal justice bills in 13 years of government and one new offence added to the statute book for every day in office.

There is a reason Johnson brushed aside the pleas of one grieving parent not to exploit his son’s death for political capital and instantly demanded that terrorists should no longer be eligible for early release as the blame game erupted. For law and order is  a key part of his strategy to tilt his party towards those who voted Brexit, often in traditional Labour heartlands of the Midlands and North. It fits with evidence that asking people if killers should be hanged or crooks whipped was among the best indicators of how someone voted in the referendum. More than half of Leave voters and Tory members back restoration of the death penalty.

These socially conservative, hardline attitudes highlight why Johnson has resorted to tired old tropes — and why Priti Patel, who backed the death penalty herself until recently, was appointed Home Secretary to re-assure these key voters. It explains why Justice Secretary Robert Buckland was over-ruled when trying to resist another pointless law on assaulting emergency workers created to please the police. And why Buckland had to dump progressive plans drawn up by his predecessor, David Gauke, to follow Scotland’s lead in scrapping short sentences, which simply destroy any stability in an offender’s life and have the highest rates of recidivism. So we carry on disrupting the lives of 10,000 people a year by pointlessly sending them to prison for less than a month.

More from this author

Our scandalous disregard for disability

By Ian Birrell

Johnson’s calculating stance corrodes his claim to be a One Nation Conservative. He is exploiting the misfortunes of vulnerable people — and indeed, of taxpayers forced to stump up £41,136 a year for each person kept behind bars. Only three months ago, the Ministry of Justice was predicting the prison population would fall slightly over the next five years. The House of Commons justice committee, chaired by Tory MP Bob Neill, last month slammed “policy by press notice” when warning the prison system in England and Wales was in an “appalling” crisis, lacking any decency or security. Sentence inflation due to headline-grabbing stunts has seen average custodial terms surge from 13.3 months to 17.3 months over a decade.

Prisons pick up the pieces from societal failure. Some violent and persistent crooks deserve to be in jail, of course, along with those set on jihadist terror — although even they can change their ways. But more than a quarter of inmates are from ethnic minorities, indicating wider structural racism.at least one-third have a learning disability, highlighting the dreadful lack of community support and crumbling social care system. Almost two-thirds have a reading age of 11 or lower, underscoring the scale of school failures and impact of family breakdown.

Seven in ten jailed men have mental health issues while women are at least six times more likely to display symptoms of psychosis than in the general public, more signs of the dire state of mental health care. I have also come across distressing cases of autistic people, their needs ignored or misunderstood by the authorities, ending up behind bars although this only intensifies their stress.

Suggested reading

The Kafkaesque nightmare of British justice

By Jenny McCartney

Yet once again we see self-serving politicians using such people as political pawns. This is a shame since some Tory justice secretaries from differing wings of the party — Ken Clarke, Michael Gove and Gauke — understood the urgent need for reform. They realised it is tougher to force citizens to confront demons of addiction, mental health struggles and educational failure than to leave them stoned all day in cells watching television.

Many conservatives in the United States have also come to see it makes no sense to keep locking up rising numbers of damaged or vulnerable citizens — whether on fiscal, humane, redemptive or criminal justice terms. I even took Gove to Texas for a BBC Panorama documentary examining the ‘Right-on-Crime’ movement that has swept the Republican party, prioritising rehabilitation over punishment and attempting to close the revolving door of imprisonment.

No such luck in Britain. Tory politicians just keep playing to the gallery regardless of the evidence and judges are forced to send people to prison for longer and longer sentences, filling up the cells with an ageing as well as expanding population. It is, of course, even harder to assess and monitor the small number of jailed people like Khan — reportedly numbering about 220 — amid such chaos.

The sad truth is many of the issues identified by John Howard back in the 18th century remain valid today: overcrowded cells, squalid conditions, poor healthcare, outbreaks of violence and lingering boredom. Yet now people are handed longer sentences, many prisons are swamped by drugs and we have made big leaps in understanding human psychology.

Our greatest prison reformer wrote in his book, The State of the Prisons in England and Wales, that “those gentlemen who, when they are told of the misery which our prisoners suffer, content themselves with saying ‘let them take care to keep out…’, forget the vicissitudes of human affairs; the unexpected changes to which men are liable”. Clearly human nature remains the same.

The abject state of our bursting prisons still shames our nation — yet once again our leaders focus only on building more holding pens for vulnerable human beings rather than tackling the problems that can lead damaged people into entanglement with the criminal justice system.