Bra Bros - W(h)ither The Rehabilitation Revolution?

[A version of this article first appeared as the Prison News column in Freedom Vol. 72 December 2011]

Well, it appears that the tail has finally been pinned on the 'Rehabilitation Revolution' donkey with the publishing of the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill and all the in-fighting surrounding what would and would not be included in it's final draft. And lo, it has come to pass that many of us have been right all along and the so-called revolution has been nothing less than the reordering of deckchairs on the penological Titanic.

So, far from being radical in any of the myriad senses of the word, some that even a conservative can apparently lay claim to, it turned out to be largely slanted towards increasing the lengths of sentences rather than as Clarke had previously stated, cutting the numbers of prisoners. Having initially pledged that he would slow the increase in prison numbers and cut the population by 3000 by the end of this parliament, subsequently upped to 6000 when he came up with the wheeze of giving a 50% sentence discount on an early guilty plea (all in the name of trimming the Ministry of Justice budget by 23% or £2bn by 2014-15), he quickly changed his tune, reining back to the 3000 figure (leaving a £100m hole in his cuts plan) and now having to resort to claiming that his aim is merely to slow any potential increase.

On top of that, LASPO contained (along side plans for the economic cleansing of the court system via the almost total abolition of Legal Aid, something brought in by the 1984 Police and Criminal Evidence Act to try and correct the all-pervasive culture of police fit-ups) clauses widening mandatory life sentencing - the so-called 'two strikes' for serious sexual and violent offences; extending determinant sentences, with longer added post-release licence periods; together with mandatory sentences for 16-17 year olds for knife possession, which will send an already massively overcrowded juvenile prison population to ever more dangerous levels.

 

 

All of this much to the chagrin of Clarke, who had both been involved in a public fight over knife sentencing with the Home Secretary Teresa May and was slagging-off mandatory sentencing and previous ‘three-strikes’ legislation till just hours before the Bill was published. As someone said, "You don't stay around in politics as long as Kenneth Clarke has by sticking to principles."

Having said that, it’s his own fault for trying to reform a judicial system that imprisons more people per head of the population than anywhere else in Europe; one that has nearly tripled the number of life sentence prisoners in the past decade to nearly 12,000, more than France, German, Poland and Russia all put together. It hasn’t helped that there has been a massive influx of remand and sentenced prisoners from the summer's riots, which have continued to set new weekly prison population records and will have pushed it through the 88,000 barrier by the time you read this. No wonder the latest projection show that there could be 94,800 prisoners banged up by 2017.

Little comfort for Clarke then that, despite retaining his prison labour and ‘victims tax’ provisions, his idiotic notion of making all prisoners work a 40-hour week appears to also be in trouble, as he has been forced to cut back the projected full-time prison industry jobs he will be able to create by the end of the decade, to just 20,000 i.e. barely double the present number.

And all this completely ignores the fact that the promised revision of the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act 1974, a modern day equivalent to the Mark of Cain and whose change is surely key to any rational attempt to change the present employment impasse for ex-prisoners, was also conspicuous in its absence from LAPSO. W(h)ither the ‘Rehabilitation Revolution’ then?