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Like many Prime Ministers before him, Andy Burnham is grappling with the fallout from a surging prison population, having been forced into a partial u-turn on plans to release offenders on license after serving just 33% of their sentence. Burnham backtracked after the mother and widow of murdered police officer PC Andrew Harper rallied media support for his killers to be detained for their full 13-year jail term for manslaughter.
Few would blame PC Harper’s family for seeking the maximum penalty possible, but for Jodie Anderson – a former barrister and now a caseworker with Inquest, the charity that represents the families of those who have died in custody – the longer-term political challenge for the new PM is to create a legal system where victims’ understandable desire for justice is balanced by a recognition that for many prisoners, spending time behind bars is a costly and ineffective deterrent.
She told the Byline Times Podcast, “We know that prison exposes people to more harm or more violence; they either die or they come out institutionalised. It's very rarely a happy story of somebody entering the prison system and coming out rehabilitated. That's why we have such high reoffending rates. So the early release scheme has been hugely overinflated in terms of its significance, because it's a very short-term measure. It will alleviate a bit of capacity, but that capacity will be quickly filled. We cannot just build our way out of this prisons crisis; building more prisons doesn't solve the issue of people entering the criminal justice system thick and fast.”
Her argument that “harsh sentences don't act as a deterrent” is supported by the evidence. Re-offending rates for those jailed in Britain are notably higher than in a country such as Norway, which places greater emphasis on rehabilitation. Anderson believes the justice system has been skewed by what she describes as ‘penal populism’, which sees Labour and Conservative politicians attempting to appease right-wing voters by promising more and tougher jail sentences. As a result, the prison population has more than doubled in the space of 30 years, despite the fact that homicide and violent crime have (contrary to the prevailing mainstream media narrative) trended downwards over the last 15 years.
This is not to suggest that serious crime should be ignored, but in Anderson’s view, “the solution is not in building more prisons; it's in prevention and diverting the billions that have been wasted on prison expansion into community services. It costs about £80,000 a year to keep a woman in prison in Bronzefield – imagine what we could do with that money. There’s always a prison space for somebody – but there is very rarely a space in a refuge, there's very rarely a mental health bed for somebody in need. When somebody enters the prison system, it exacerbates the problem. People think that prisons are there to a protect the public, to punish, and to rehabilitate. I would say they're certainly succeeding at punishing people. The conditions are absolutely horrific; stuff you couldn't conjure up in your worst nightmares.”
She points out that while the death penalty was abolished more than 60 years ago in the UK, more than 400 prisoners died in jail last year. Anderson’s cousin Marcus McGuire died by his own hand at HMP Birmingham in 2018 – one of three self-inflicted deaths at the same jail over an 18-month period. Marcus had been hospitalised for a serious act of self-harm just five weeks before his death, but monitoring of his cell for suicide was neverthless withdrawn.
“It pains me to say that this is not an exceptional story,” Anderson says. “The stories of people coming through Inquest’s doors are so similar…[there’s] a culture of indifference.”
Listen to Adrian Goldberg’s full interview with Jodie Anderson here.
