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

Tainted by the James Bulger legacy

Why does the horrific murder of a Merseyside toddler by two young boys in 1993 still have such a lasting effect on the way we demonise and stereotype disturbed children?

Nasty little juveniles. Hooligans. Freaks. Bastards. Worthless. Evil. Those are just a few of the words used by our politicians and media to describe some of the country's children. It could be now, but this was in 1993, the year that two-year-old James Bulger was murdered on Merseyside by two 10-year-old boys.

I grew up with what headlines described as "hooligans on holiday". In 1985, my parents set up Bryn Melyn, a home in north Wales to look after some of the most disturbed teenagers in the country. They included children who'd slice themselves open to push paper clips underneath their own skin; a girl who inserted shards of a smashed lightbulb inside her vagina; a boy whose guardians – his grandparents – would hold his hands in the fire to punish him; and a pubescent girl whose parents would drag her out of bed when they got back from the pub so their friends could have sex with her.

The "holiday" bit referred to the intensive one-to-one trips abroad my dad designed to kick-start their rehabilitation. These trips were incredibly successful. Before we sent the first boy away, he had regularly assaulted the staff and other teenagers. After returning from a three-month trip to France, he went to work with Alzheimer's patients. A short spell in prison – this boy's only other option – has a failure rate for young men of about 90%.

As part of my research for a book I am writing about Bryn Melyn, I've studied the newspaper coverage of 1993 to trace the path between the horrific Bulger murder and the way we view young people today.

When the death of James hit the papers, the Daily Star offered a £20,000 reward "to trap beasts who killed little James". The Guardian reported a "lynch mob" outside the home of a wrongly arrested 12-year-old suspect. In the Sun, Richard Littlejohn screeched: "This is no time for calm. It is a time for rage, for blood-boiling anger, for furious venting of spleen." Headlines such as "Evil that makes a child kill", "Locked up in luxury", "Riot mob fears at Jamie court" dominated the newspapers.

It was also the perfect opportunity for the Tories to reassert themselves as the party of law and order. Three days after James's body was found, the then prime minister, John Major, gave an interview to the Mail on Sunday, highlighting his tough stance on crime. He said: "Society needs to condemn a little more and understand a little less." Five days later, his home secretary, Kenneth Clarke, announced plans to incarcerate children as young as 12. When it came to the two boys charged with the Bulger murder, the policeman in charge of the case, Detective Superintendent Albert Kirby, asked us "to remember that they are 10 years of age". But the law didn't. Jon Venables and Robert Thompson were tried as adults.

"How do you feel now, you little bastards?" asked the Daily Star's front page on the day of the sentence. "Evil, brutal and cunning," said the Mail. The Mirror went for "Freaks of nature".

Despite the sensationalist, fear-mongering coverage of the Bulger case, my father was still taken by surprise when he first went on television to talk about his work. "When the producers of Eamonn Holmes's chat show invited me along to 'put across my side of the story', I naively believed them," he says. "I walked into the studios just before the programme went live. As it did, a huge 'Hooligans on Holiday' banner unrolled behind me. Then three women in the audience stood up with pictures of their dead children, who'd been killed by joyriders. Our kids had never killed anyone, and many hadn't even offended, but the producers were quite happy to confuse joyriders, murderers, young offenders and children in care.

"Throughout the negative press attention, social services knew the trips worked, and continued to place children with us. But the kids themselves were very upset and angry. They felt they were being verbally abused by the whole country."

In response to a Sun campaign, Michael Howard, who had become home secretary, (illegally) extended the sentences imposed on Venables and Thompson from 10 years to 15 years. And in response to the media furore surrounding Bryn Melyn, Howard also banned therapeutic trips abroad for children in care.

Recent media attention has turned to Edlington, South Yorkshire, where two brothers, aged 10 and 11, brutally burnt, stabbed and sexually assaulted two boys, aged nine and 11. This incident has the same ingredients as the Bulger case: the horrific attack, the disastrous parenting, the boys' escalating violence, and the failure of the relevant authorities to do anything about it.

It is a simple cause and effect; incidents like these don't just happen. But instead of tackling this problem rationally, we defer to hysteria and hollow accusations that solve nothing and protect no one.

These days, we have Facebook pages and YouTube video montages dedicated to James Bulger, created by people who, apparently, never even met him. Nobody will say that these are mawkish, sentimental and ultimately extremely damaging in their creation of monstrous, unsubstantiated fears about young people. Nobody will say to Denise Fergus, the mother of James Bulger, that it has got nothing to do with her swhen she demands that the Edlington boys be named. Nobody seems bothered that the media has casually dubbed the Edlington boys the "devil brothers" or "hell boys".

But amid this fresh wave of moral panic, there is a glint of optimism. A new documentary by Spirit Level Films, The Fear Factory, was launched in London on Monday, and attempts to untangle the perceptions we have about our "dangerous" young people. Increasingly frustrated with the perpetuation of stereotypes and the way young people are treated in care, the criminal justice system, and even schools, three organisations – Safer Wales Ltd, Construction Youth Trust and Addaction – commissioned the film, which includes interviews with politicians, heads of charities and teenagers. "We want the film to be a wake-up call to politicians, colleagues who work in this field, and to the media," says Barbara Natasegara, chief executive of Safer Wales.

A failure to intervene with a holistic approach early in the lives of young people at risk of offending has had stark consequences. We spend 11 times more on locking children up than on preventing youth crime. About 75% of young people leaving custody will reoffend, and 27% of adult prisoners have been in care. Reoffending by these former children in care costs about £3bn a year.

As a result of The Fear Factory, more than 40 charities have now formed a coalition to lobby the government to put a stop to our relentless demonisation of young people.

Seventeen years on, it still sickens me to remember the parents of the children in Bryn Melyn who gave newspaper interviews complaining that the way my father was treating their children was a waste of time, that what he was doing was wrong.

Helen McNutt
The Guardian
Wednesday 3 March 2010
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2010/mar/03/james-bulger-legacy-disturbed-children

Gordon Brown set to end early jail release scheme

• PM bids to head off Tory crime attack
• Labour accused of 'cynical' poll ploy

Gordon Brown is set to announce the end of the controversial early release scheme for prisoners before the general election in an attempt to blunt an expected Tory assault on the government's law and order policies.

The Observer can reveal that urgent discussions are under way between No 10, the Ministry of Justice and the Home Office in preparation for an announcement within weeks.

Senior government sources say the prime minister may announce the end of the scheme in a major speech on law and order early next month, in which he is also expected to reveal new measures on neighbourhood policing.

Officials said the availability of prison places remained under review on a weekly basis, and that no final decision had been made. But a well-placed source said: "It is our intention to do this before the election if we can."

Last night the Tories, who have been consistent critics of the scheme, accused the government of a cynical manoeuvre aimed at making life difficult for a Conservative government after the election, which is expected on 6 May.

Alan Duncan, the shadow prisons minister, said the scheme should be ended only when conditions in prisons were right, rather than for political reasons. "It is right that the early release scheme should go, but only when the correct measures have been put in place to allow this to happen," he said.

"Labour is seeking deliberately to leave us with a poisoned pill by claiming credit for doing this in March, while knowing that it will leave us, after the election, with a crisis in June."

The early release scheme has been contentious since its introduction in 2007, with critics claiming it has resulted in murders and thousands of other crimes as prisoners have been let out early to relieve pressure on jail places.

Among the most controversial cases was that of Andrew Mournian, 36, who was released 18 days early from a jail sentence for attacking his partner, Amanda Murphy, a mother of two. Five days after his release, he battered her to death.

In 2008, Straw announced a ban on the early release of terrorists, following criticism after a man convicted of smuggling a blueprint for a missile into Britain was released 17 days early. Yassin Nassari had been sentenced to three-and-a-half years' imprisonment.

Under the rules of the programme, prisoners serving sentences of up to four years can be released 18 days before they would previously have been eligible. By the end of 2009, a total of 76,886 prisoners had been released early.

Ministers said the move was necessary to ease the pressure on prisons and would always be ended when it was "practically possible" and as more space became available. But critics have pounced on the timing of the announcement.

Harry Fletcher, assistant general secretary of the National Association of Probation Officers (Napo), pointed out that the prison population was still extremely high. "They are doing this to outflank the Tories, who have already said they want to scrap it," he said. Fletcher said the scheme had resulted in a reduction of between 2,500 to 3,000 in the prison population, but said Napo opposed it because of the way in which it had been implemented.

"We didn't like it because there was no home circumstances check and no risk assessment; so they just turfed them out," he said. "And perpetrators of domestic violence were being let out and doing it again. Because they are released three weeks early, it wrong-foots all the authorities. At least if we had [the time] to plan we could have put panic buttons in a woman's flat, for instance."

Gary Streeter, a Tory MP on the home affairs select committee, claimed it was a "cynical ploy" by the government to end the measure just before an election. "The early release scheme has been a great source of contention and helped to undermine confidence in the British justice system. Nothing is beyond them in terms of cynical ploys. But I am glad if it is coming to an end; people should serve their full sentence – that is what the public wants," he said.

Charities also opposed the programme. Juliet Lyon, director of the Prison Reform Trust, said it had made it difficult to plan sentences and prepare prisoners for release. "But, in the scramble to end it, will government be able to capitalise on the success of its intensive community penalties, or is it being forced back on pouring public money down the drain of needless prison building?" she asked. "Until a government of any stripe is prepared to integrate its social and justice policies, and invest accordingly, prisons will lurch from crisis to crisis and one politically expedient idea to the next."

News of the government's planned announcement comes at the end of a week in which the Ministry of Justice said it was dropping plans to build a prison in Barking, east London. A jail to house 1,500 prisoners was to be built on the site of an old Ford factory. But a spokesman said the cost of protecting the site against flooding was too high.

Last year, Jack Straw, the justice secretary, said the government was abandoning proposals for Titan prisons to hold 2,500 prisoners each. Instead, there would be five 1,500-place prisons, including the one in Barking and one at Runwell, in Essex. Officials said the Runwell plans were still on track.

In December, the latest month for which there are statistics, there were 2,187 early releases under the scheme. The Justice Ministry admitted that there had been 57 decisions to recall prisoners, with almost half linked to reoffending. A spokesman said last night: "Ministers have made clear they will end ECL [end of custody licence] as soon as there is sufficient capacity to do so; we are working extremely hard to build new places, with the fastest ever creation of prison spaces. We are keeping under review how long ECL remains in place in light of new prison capacity coming on stream."

guardian.co.uk,
Sunday 14 February 2010
Toby Helm and Anushka Asthana

Tories 'distributed misleading figures on violent crime'

BBC investigation finds Conservatives omitted Home Office caveats about use of crime statistics

The Conservatives today denied distorting statistics amid claims that they distributed misleading figures on violent crime.

Official figures sent out for campaigning purposes to Tory activists in constituencies throughout England and Wales appeared to show that there had been sharp increases in violence during Labour's time in office.

But a BBC investigation found that the Conservatives omitted Home Office warnings that the figures for the periods before and after 2002 were not comparable because of a change in the way violent crime was recorded.

Instead of police officers deciding whether an incident should be recorded as a violent crime, the decision was given to the alleged victim, with the effect of forcing up recorded violence by an estimated 35% in the first year, according to the BBC.

The British Crime Survey suggested that people's experience of violent crime has in fact fallen by around 50% since 1995.

Chris Grayling, the shadow home secretary, defended using the statistics without any warning to alert readers to the change in recording methods.

He told BBC Radio 4's Today programme this morning: "There are certainly changes in the recording methods, but the point is that they are the only comparators available. They are published by the Home Office.

"We don't create crime figures. We use the official crime figures published by the Home Office. The Home Office has continued to use the same comparators. As an opposition party, we don't make the statistics. We can only use what the Home Office publishes."

Grayling said that the British Crime Survey was not a reliable guide to violent crime because it omitted offences such as murder and manslaughter.

He said that an independent assessment of the Home Office's use of statistics in 2006 found that warnings attached to official figures were designed to be politically advantageous to the government.

"If you talk to anybody in the streets, and particularly in the poorest areas which are most affected by violent crime, you will find people will absolutely say that violent crime has risen sharply over the last 10 years," he said.

"The reality is that that is the life they are experiencing. The problem we have got to deal with is not debates over statistics. It is actually sorting out these problems, it is delivering better policing in these areas and getting to grips with the problems in these communities."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/feb/03/tories-violent-crime-statistics/print