Former prisons chief attacks Jack Straw over penal reform stance

Martin Narey confronts shadow justice secretary over his criticism of Ken Clarke's views on cutting the prison population

Martin Narey, former head of the Prison and Probation service, who last night attacked Jack Straw's stance on penal reform. Photograph: Martin Argles for the Guardian

The former prison service director-general Martin Narey last night angrily confronted Jack Straw over his "Daily Mail assassination" of Ken Clarke's landmark prisons speech that could have paved the way for a new cross-party consensus on penal reform.

Narey told Straw that he was "terribly disappointed by your assassination of Ken Clarke in the Daily Mail the next day".

He said Straw as a former justice secretary should have "given Ken Clarke a break when he says that the prison population should go down".

Narey said that home secretaries and justice secretaries could "talk the prison population up or talk it down", and the courts responded. He said Douglas Hurd had "talked down'' the prison population by 4,000 when he was home secretary in the late 1980s: "You can set the scene," Narey told Straw.

The impassioned clash took place at a Fabian Society/Prison Reform Trust Labour conference fringe meeting. Straw did not take the criticism lightly, claiming that Clarke had been widely regarded as a failure as home secretary: "Let me tell you, Martin, we were the first party to get crime down since the war."

For good measure Straw also denounced the record of Hurd, who is currently president of the Prison Reform Trust, saying that although he "greatly respected him, the truth was that when he was home secretary crime rocketed up and the Tories lost the plot on crime".

The exchange had been prompted by Straw seeking to justify his record as home secretary and justice secretary during which the prison population rose from 62,000 to 85,000.

He said he had not wanted to see the prison population go up on his watch. Indeed his policy had been to try to stabilise prison numbers. But he said the size of the prison population was not an objective of his law and order policy but the consequence of Labour's "tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime" approach.

"I am not suggesting that I was some kind of hard bastard ... but you have to take the public with you," he said. He added that when Narey had been his director-general of prisons a lot of work had been done on trying to establish the relationship between prison sentence lengths and reoffending rates to establish what worked.

He insisted, however, that 75% of those in prison were persistent violent offenders who were a danger to the community who, he said, deserved a measure of respite care, which was afforded by sending them to jail for a few weeks.

Straw also defended Labour's record on prison conditions saying the jails were completely different places now to what they were in 1997 including the provision of in-cell televisions which he had pushed ahead with in the face of Downing Street opposition.

Others at the fringe meeting however saw an opportunity for a new political consensus on penal policy in the wake of Ken Clarke's speech with the new Labour leader, Ed Miliband, on record saying he thinks may provide the basis for a cross-party policy on prisons.

The Guardian
28 September 2010
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/blog/2010/sep/28/prisons-jack-straw-penal-reform

The Fear Factory: Jack Straw playing the law and order ‘arms race’

Press Release: 30 June 2010

The Fear Factory Coalition welcomes Ken Clarke’s proposals today made in a speech to the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies, echoing the views of The Fear Factory documentary which exposed ‘the tough talk fallacy that has led to the current crisis in the criminal justice system’ and revealed how crime and the fear of crime have been used by politicians contrary to the public interest for the last 30 years.

However, we are appalled by Jack Straw’s subsequent backlash in The Daily Mail which flies in the face of evidence. With a prison population of over 84,000 and a reoffending rate of 60% - rising to almost 95% for young males, his arguments that prison does work are nothing but fear mongering and an attempt to ratchet up the law and order ‘arms race’ for his own political ends.

The Fear Factory documentary includes contributions from Erwin James (ex-offender and Guardian columnist), Joyce Moseley (Director, Catch 22), Juliet Lyon (Director, Prison Reform Trust), David Howarth (ex Shadow Sec of State for Justice, Lib Dems), Dominic Grieve (ex Shadow Sec of State for Justice, Conservatives and now Attorney General), Maria Eagle (ex Minister for Justice, Labour), Chris Roycroft Davis (Ex Deputy Editor of the Sun), Paul Cavadino (ex Director of NACRO), Barry and Margaret Mizzen, Professor Rod Morgan (ex Head of the YJB) and Martin Narey (ex DG of the Prison Service and Director of Barnardo’s). The Fear Factory Coalition, inspired by the film has 57 member organisations. The consensus is clear: tough measures are not the same as effective measures, a point that Jack Straw deliberately seems to be missing.

--ENDS

Notes:
• For further information and a list of coalition members contact Rachel Bird at rachel@spiritlevelfilm.com / 020 7569 3039; or visit www.thefearfactory.co.uk.
• Excerpts and trailers can be found online, or we can provide a full copy on request.
• We have a comprehensive list of high profile speakers who would be willing to provide and interview or comment.
• Attached is a key list of quotes on the film, quotes from the film can be found online: www.thefearfactory.co.uk/about.php. Please feel free to use them but we politely ask you credit the film and where appropriate, link to this site.
• The Fear Factory film and Coalition have been generously funded by The Nationwide Foundation: www.nationwidefoundation.org.uk.

The Youth Crime Arms Race

Politicians from all parties are engaged in an arms race of rhetoric in relation to their approach to children in contact with the criminal justice system. The media fuels the arms race with sensationalist headlines: ‘yobs’, ‘asbo kids’, ‘monsters’ and ‘evil’ have become common place, encouraging a vicious cycle in which politicians find themselves locked into increasing the punitive stakes to satisfy the appetites of the media and populist opinion.

The increasingly punitive approach that has emerged over the last 20 years, whether it be in creating more crimes, creating longer sentences, or reducing the quality of type of prison that children are sent to, have left our society in a position where we are spending £415 million a year on incarcerating children in prisons that do not work – a shocking 75% of children reoffend within a year of being released, higher than any other age group in prison.

Behind the headlines and political rhetoric lie the facts of who these children are. 71% of children in custody have been involved with or in the care of social services; 2 out of 5 girls and 1 out of 4 boys have suffered violence at home; 1 in 3 girls and 1 in 20 boys have suffered sexual abuse. Educational, behavioural and mental health problems are rife – 85% show signs of a personality disorder. The prevalence of depression, self harm and suicide is higher amongst incarcerated children that any other sector in our society – 89% of girls in our prisons deliberately self-harm and children in custody are 18 times more prone to take their own life than children of the same age in the community.

Children in prison are the product of chaos, neglect and abuse, but rather than help these children we incarcerate them, locking them away with the problems in our society we would rather not face. To continue the rhetoric arms race is both nonsensical and irresponsible. It damages these children further at an extraordinary cost to the tax payer. But it is easier to separate these children from the rest of us, to point the finger of blame and label them as an ‘other’ than to take responsibility that it is our society and its failings that has made them who they are.

Andrew Neilson
Assistant Director
the Howard League for Penal Reform