Prison the American way
Malcolm Dean
Howard's way will never make prison work, says Malcolm Dean
A succession of reports has punctured the promise made by Michael Howard, then home secretary, in the 1990s that "prison works". Those written by Halliday in 2001 and Carter in 2004 supported calls made by the lord chief justice, successive chief inspectors of prisons and prison directors that too many people were being sent to prison.
Now, an American who was at the centre of the US criminal justice system that Howard sought to copy, is in town with the same message.
Until Howard's arrival as home secretary in 1993, there was a political consensus on the need to reserve prison for serious and violent offenders. Indeed, under Douglas Hurd's reign (1985/89) at the Home Office, the prison population shrank by 5,000, and under the rightwing David Waddington (1989/90), a white paper declared prisons were "an expensive way of making bad people worse".
But under Howard a new era began with not just tougher rhetoric but tougher laws, particularly US-style "three strike" laws imposing mandatory minimum sentences - an approach that has been continued and strengthened by Labour.
A UK prison population that took four decades to increase by 11,000 between 1951 and 1991, climbed by 25,000 in the decade between 1992 and 2002. Despite the largest and most sustained fall in crime for more than a century - a 40% reduction in burglary and car crime - we are still sending proportionately more people to prison than some of the most repressive foreign regimes such as Burma, Saudi Arabia and China.
The current jail population, which last month reached a new high of 76,000, still teeters "on the edge", in the words of Anne Owers, the chief inspector. But prisons have been at bursting point for so long - accommodating 24% more than their recommended capacity - that it is no longer news. Yet even old hands were shocked by the 12 suicides in the first 13 days of this month. More trouble is likely as courts continue to apply the government's tough policies while the Treasury vetoes a new prison building programme.
Right on cue, one of America's best known prison directors, Michael Jacobson, mayor Rudy Giuliani's commissioner of corrections, has been in London explaining how Howard got it wrong. He says New York did not "imprison its way out of a crime crisis. While the city's crime rates were falling during the 1990s, so was its use of imprisonment. Crime and prison populations can drop simultaneously. New York city's prison population dropped from 23,000 to 13,500 between 1992 and 2002."
Jacobson is just the man to convince the Treasury their cap on the prison building programme was right. He served for 10 years in the city's budget bureau, where he saw the huge waste of the criminal justice system. Since running the city's probation and prison services, he has moved on to be director of the Vera Institute of Justice, from where he has advised a succession of states to follow New York's example.
Howard's criminal justice package is being unpicked across America. Some 25 states have abandoned mandatory minimum sentences and accelerated early release and community programmes. The switch from punitive to preventive programmes is not confined to Democratic states. California, which had one of the toughest "three strikes" laws, has since moved towards treatment rather than prison for non violent drug users. So has Colorado, a much more rightwing state. Even George Bush has spoken in support of a "second chance" bill that would provide more money for prisoners on release.
What has caused the US shift? A combination of events, according to Jacobson. First, public attitudes have changed as crime has dropped. Like the UK, education and health are far higher up the public's priority list than crime control. Indeed without our fear-inducing tabloids, crime is a much lower priority.
Second, tighter state budgets forced legislators to begin thinking about shrinking their prison populations. "Fiscal restraints create an opportunity in which budgets can trump politics," says Jacobson. "Even American conservatives are ready to buy into the waste: $30,000 a year per place and 50% are back there within three years of release." Third, new research has confirmed the effectiveness of community programmes.
Then there are the statistics. The 10 states with the lowest increases in prisoners between 1992 and 2002 had by far the biggest decreases in violent crime. The 10 states with the highest increase in prisoners had the biggest increase in violent crime.
America's mass incarceration programme - some 2.2m in prison - was "a public policy gone mad". The dip has only just begun, but Jacobson is optimistic it will accelerate.
If the US can switch, so can the UK. The Treasury cap on prisons was right. Hopefully it could force courts, parliament and ministers to not just talk about the benefits of community programmes, but insist they are delivered. With luck, perhaps, another triumph for budgets over politics.
· Malcolm Dean is the Guardian's leader writer on social affairs.