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

Barnardo's

The rise in the prison population since Labour came to power in 1997 has been dramatic, with a third more people behind bars. But there has been an even more startling rise in the number of very young children imprisoned. In the decade from 1996 the use of custody for 10 to 14 year olds increased by a staggering 400%. England and Wales now stand out almost alone in Western society in routinely incarcerating large numbers of young children who offend.

The law is clear that children should only be sent to prison if their offending has been grave or both serious and persistent. Justice Secretary, Jack Straw, has further asserted that children as young as 12, 13 and 14 should only ever be incarcerated when it is the only way to protect the public. So are the teenagers being sent to custody guilty of grave crimes or of serious and persistent offending? Are they all violent? Do they pose an unmanageable risk to the public? In fact, research by Barnardo’s published last year (Locking up or giving up?) shows that many of them are neither violent nor dangerous. They have been found guilty of non-violent offences and some are guilty only of summary offences, the least serious on the statute book and those which, in the case of adults, are rarely punished by imprisonment.

Barnardo’s examined 214 cases of children under 15 who had been sentenced to custody but had not committed grave crimes or been given extended sentences for serious offending. We found that one in five was in prison for breach of a community sanction and nearly a third had not committed a serious or violent offence. Overall, 35 per cent of the sample did not appear to meet the custody threshold as set out in legislation. This clearly demonstrates that the government’s intention of making custody for young children genuinely a last resort is not reflected in sentencing practice.

When we looked at the life circumstances of the children it was depressingly clear that those who end up in custody are almost always those most failed by our welfare and education systems. Half had experienced some form of abuse, one in five were living in care,16 per cent had special educational needs and 8 per cent had attempted suicide at some point in their young lives.
If these children had been given the support they needed earlier in their lives there is every reason to believe that they would not have ended up in prison. Instead they are more likely to be written off by the age of 14, failed by mainstream services when it really matters.
Using custody for children who have not committed grave and serious crimes is costly and ineffective. They do not pose a danger to the public, if anything they are a greater danger to themselves than anybody else. Can anyone really believe that we need to lock so many of them away?

Enver Solomon
Barnardo’s
Assistant Director, Policy