It's time for politicians to take a radical approach to criminal justice

http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/legal/article2906316.ece

By Robert Verkaik, Law Editor
Published: 30 August 2007

Britain's prison system is on the verge of collapse. Our crumbling jails
have reached breaking point, prisoners are being released early and now, for
the first time in their history, the men and women paid to guard the inmates
have left their posts.

It's a desperate situation made worse by the grim truth that prison has
failed to stop inmates re-offending. And suicide rates remain alarmingly
high, a fact brought home by the death of another inmate yesterday.

How long can politicians continue to tell us that the only way to avert this
crisis is by building more prisons? Britain already imprisons more people
per capita than any other country in Western Europe and if the trend
continues the number of inmates will pass 100,000 in the next decade.

Labour's response is to pledge 10,000 more prison places by 2012. The Tories
have committed to using prison ships and disused army camps so that all
inmates see out their sentences.

For many years Britain's penal reformers have been warning of where these
increasingly draconian policies will lead.

Frances Crook, director of the Howard League for Penal Reform, says we are
using a Victorian invention to tackle a 21st-century problem: "Prison does
nothing to deter offending. Yet our obsession with placing punishment...
over cutting crime has led to gross overcrowding."

Justice, the human rights group, says it is impossible to have a sensible
debate about penal reform because it has been become bogged down in
"electioneering rhetoric and swamped by legislative hyperactivity".

This week an ICM poll showed that only 40 per cent of the public thought the
government should aim to send more criminals to prison, against 57 per cent
who want to see other, non-custodial forms of punishment.

Now that politicians can see that radical alternatives to prison may no
longer alienate the electorate they have little excuse for not trying
something different.



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