Keep more convicts in open prisons to slash reoffending, sentencing tsar David Gauke says amid overcrowding crisis
27 December 2024, 11:55
More convicts should be sent to open prisons to ease overcrowding and increase rehabilitation, a former Tory Justice Secretary appointed by Labour to overhaul sentencing has told LBC.
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David Gauke, who is leading the Government's sentencing review, said that open prisons better prepare prisoners for reintegration into society and make them less likely to reoffend.
Speaking to LBC's Iain Dale, Mr Gauke said that inmates in open prisons are "better prepared for going into the community, to integrate into society, and not to reoffend."
Mr Gauke is in charge of a government sentencing review, and is suggesting the use of open prisons to ease Britain's overcrowded prisons crisis.
The former Tory Justice Secretary visited prisons in Spain, where a much higher proportion of prisoners are in open prisons.
He suggests the UK can learn from other countries like Spain and Norway where re-offending rates are lower.
He said: "They do have lower re-offending rates in Spain, and I think some of that is almost certainly down to the approach they take in prisons."
Asked by Iain Dale about how long prison reforms would take, Mr Gauke said the government has to address "something of a crisis that we face, that the prison population is rising very quickly and we do not have capacity."
He added: "The government has dad to make some difficult choices already, but that problem is only going to get worse.
"So we're going to have to do something about that, which is in the short- to medium-term.
"But it is also an opportunity to look at what 'good' looks like in terms of a prison system."
The sentencing review is still calling for evidence, and will report in the Spring, but is considering open prisons as a solution.
An open prison is a prison where low risk inmates have more freedom than in other prisons, meaning they can be rehabilitated while serving their sentence.
Some inmates can go out to work or take up education in the daytime, and they are trusted to complete their sentence with less supervision and perimeter security.
Mr Gauke said: "It's necessary to build open prisons, you got to locate the sites and so on, we don't have a lot of capacity here but it's certainly something we want to look at over a longer time frame.
"You also have to be very careful in assessing who should go into open prisons.
"I'm not suggesting for a moment that we overnight move thousands of prisoners from enclosed prisons to open prisons, there needs to be a proper thorough process here.
"But nonetheless if you look at what other countries do, I think there is scope to increase the use of open prisons, and that would benefit society as a whole because it would help bring down reoffending.
"Less reoffending, fewer crimes, fewer victims. That's what we all want to achieve."
Mr Gauke, who served as justice secretary between January 2018 and July 2019 under Theresa May was appointed earlier this year to lead the Government's sentencing review, which aims to explore tougher punishments outside of prison while also making sure there is space to incarcerate the most dangerous offenders.
Asked why the prison population is going up as crime is coming down, Mr Gauke said: "The answer to that, Iain, appears to be quite a simple one, which is that sentences have gone up a lot in the last 30 years."
He added: "This is not necessarily what the public appreciate, but sentences now are much longer than they were 30 years ago, and that drives the prison population.
"And we haven't expanded the prison capacity to match it. Prison capacity has gone up a lot but it's not gone up as much as demand because of those longer sentences.
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On the point of abolishing short-term jail sentences under two years and finding alternative punishments, Mr Gauke told Iain Dale: "You're right to say that all the evidence on short sentences shows that they are ineffective in terms of reducing reoffending.
"We're certainly going to look at that area. Where I think we do have to be realistic, is yes, there are clearly some savings in terms of reducing the prison population.
"[But] it won't get us all the way, the numbers of people in prison who are there for a very short time, at any one time, is relatively small.
"We are talking about a thousand, two thousand places maybe can be found as a consequence of a change of approach here ... but it won't solve the entirety of the problem.
"Bear in mind our prison population had doubled from 43,000 in 1993 to 86,000 today, we have the highest incarceration rate in Western Europe and it's forecast to increase by 4,500 per year.
He added "The government inherited a really difficult problem here, so we're not going to be able to solve this entirely by looking at short sentences, I think we have to be realistic about that."
Pressed about Britain's high incarceration rate, Mr Gauke said: "Prison is the right place for the most serious offenders
"But when you look at the historic position, the international position, and when you look at the fact that building new prisons is an expensive process,
"I think there is scope to deliver a more effective justice system that achieves more in terms of reducing crime, but perhaps makes less of a demand on taxpayers.
"Prison is an expensive way, but not an effective way, very often, to deal with reducing re-offending."
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Earlier in December, Justice Secretary Shabana Mahmood said that building alone" will not be enough to deal with the overcrowding crisis.
She said that "we will have to expand the range of punishment outside of prison", adding: "That does mean that we will have more offenders monitored outside."
The Ministry of Justice has promised to find a total of 14,000 cell spaces in jails by 2031.
Some 6,400 of these will be at newly built prisons, with £2.3 billion towards the cost over the next two years.
Asked whether the estate would run out of cells within three years, even with 14,000 extra places, the Justice Secretary told BBC Radio 4's Today programme earlier this month: "We will run out because even all of that new supply, with the increase in prison population that we will see as a result of that new supply, doesn't help you with the rise in demand, because demand is still rising faster than any supply could catch up with."
