Economania

When a general election looms it can be guaranteed that all parties will declare their position on law and order, promising to be ‘tough on crime’. After the election, the party which forms a government finds itself confronting the grim realities of crime and the perennial crisis in the UK prison system.

In September 2024 the recently elected Labour government commenced its early release scheme in response to the critical overcrowding of Britain’s prisons. It began with an initial release of 1,700 prisoners and followed that with a further release of 1,100 prisoners in October. Regardless of this initiative the government still has a prison system that is overcrowded and largely failing in its objective to reform and rehabilitate offenders.

Rates of recidivism are currently running at an average of 28% overall. Within this, rates of reoffending among juveniles runs at 31.5%, while for adults released from sentences of less than 12 months the rate of reoffending rises to an alarming 62.4%. (Ministry of Justice, 2023/Q3)

The current dismal situation is not newly arrived. One remembers the riot at HMP Strangeways in 1990 when the prison was all but destroyed by its inmates. The cost of the damage caused was £55 million. There were subsequent riots at other prisons. The government commissioned Lord Woolf to report and he concluded that conditions in the prisons had been intolerable, and recommended major reform of the UK prison system.

Thirty-five years on we seem to have made little progress. To be fair there are some prisons achieving good results in reforming and rehabilitating, but overall the prison system continues to fail. To understand the roots of the problem we need to go back over 175 years.

As the Industrial Revolution entered its second phase (high-pressure steam-engines, railways and hot-blast iron-smelting) in the early 19th century so the population of Britain began a massive shift towards urbanisation. The old certainties and slow rhythms of rural life were swept away by the mill and the clock. The rural cottage was replaced by the endless terraces of rapidly-erected houses which so appalled Friedrich Engels, prompting him in 1845 to describe the slums of Manchester as ‘hell upon Earth’.

At this same time there was a not unsurprising increase in crime. Between 1800 and 1840 the crime-rate rose fourfold, from around 5,000 offences per annum to around 20,000 per annum. The population of Britain in 1840 was about 26.5 million. The Establishment was thrown into one of its occasional moral panics and began a programme of building prisons. Between 1842 and 1877 a total of 90 prisons were built to accommodate the newly-emerging legions of offenders. There had always been village and small-town lock-ups, and prisons in large cities, but this was prison-building on a wholly new scale, both in terms of number and more so in size. It seems then in retrospect that the rapid transition to an urbanised, industrialised society resulted in a degree of social dislocation that manifested in increasing crime.

In 1900 British prisons (England, Wales and Scotland) held about 20,000 inmates – an incarceration rate of about 0.075%. Between 1914 and 1918 the prison population fell by almost one-half, not least because thousands of potential criminals had died in the trenches of Flanders. The rate of incarceration stabilised between 1930 and 1940 at about 0.030% but then began once more to rise and has done so ever since with just the occasional dip.

By 1988 the prison population had reached about 54,000 - an incarceration rate of 0.095%. This followed the deep recession that ensued after the early years of the Thatcher government whose policies had brought about the loss of 20-25% of British manufacturing and the consequent unemployment and social dislocation of the communities supported by those industries.

Even then, the consequences of the Thatcher government’s second recession in the very early 1990s – the one which followed the ‘Lawson boom’ of the very late 1980s – were even greater in terms of crime.

From 1993 to 2012, despite Thatcher’s defenestration, the advent of first the Major government and then the Blair government, the prison population soared from ca. 50,000 to ca. 92,000 – that latter being an incarceration rate of 0.146%. The recession of the early 1980s was deeply damaging – and most eloquently expressed in The Specials’ Ghost Town - but it did perhaps root out some of the inefficiencies in British industry while leaving something intact. The recession of the early 1990s was more damaging in that it further eviscerated what was left of British manufacturing and caused irreparable economic damage.

This is all costing money. The cost of crime to its victims was estimated at ca. £60 billion per annum in 2018. The Home Office spends over £9 billion per annum on criminal court cases. The situation is further aggravated by the backlog of criminal cases waiting to be heard. As of September 2024 a total of over 73,000 cases were waiting to be heard and some of these will not come to court for four years. The cost of a prison place is now, on average, £54,000 per annum, equating to almost £5 billion per annum in total across the entire prison estate.

It is not just the scale of crime that alarms but its current nature. Readers of a certain age will remember the case of Mary Bell, who murdered two children, or the Moors Murderers, or the two boys who murdered James Bulger. These cases were notable not just because of their extremity but also because of their rarity.

Violence is now a commonplace. One teenager is stabbed to death every week in Britain. We have seen in recent times crimes of wanton violence – the murder of Bimh Kohli by a 14 year-old and a 12-year-old in Leicester as he walked his dog; the murder of Brianna Ghey by two teenagers. And there are many, many more cases in this dismal catalogue of incomprehensible violence. These crimes are not instrumental, acquisitive crimes but crimes that speak of a deep social malaise and of civic decomposition. There is now not a town, nor even a village, in Britain, which is not afflicted by county lines drug gangs and the violence they bring.

This from ‘Bristol Live’:- “A child ended up in hospital after being badly beaten up when around 30 youths were fighting and running amok in Cabot Circus in Bristol on Friday night. Police are investigating the incident, and appealing for witnesses to come forward and speak to them, as the victim of the assault is recovering.

The incident happened at around 8.30pm on Friday evening (August 15) in the shopping centre, at the end of George White Street, the main middle entrance to the centre from Broadmead. Police said they were called by security who reported ‘around 30 youths’ - both boys and girls - were fighting.

It is the latest in an almost annual report of teenagers running amok with violence and anti-social behaviour in Cabot Circus and Broadmead. Two years ago (January 2023), people visiting restaurants in the shopping centre told Bristol Live of how a ‘feral, savage mob of up to 100 teenagers’ engaged in a violent spree one Saturday evening.”

What is perhaps most disturbing is the content of a speech given in 2021 by Kenneth Clarke, Chancellor of the Exchequer from 1993 to 1997, and holder of numerous ministerial positions since 1979. He said: “We didn’t think there was going to be this lasting and permanent effect on sections of society. Nor did we foresee that the benefits of the new economy were not going to be spread out properly. The widening divide between those who really thrived under the new economy, and those who suffered, the gaps between the rich and the poor, which have got worse, steadily, through Thatcher, Major, Blair and other governments over the last twenty-odd years. We still haven’t quite worked out how to address that.”

Did governments over the last 46 years really not understand the ultimate consequences of their economic policies?

It would seem not. The present government has pledged to build more prisons, over the next 6 years, in order to provide space for a projected 14,000 more offenders. Even then that will not alleviate the pressure on the prison system. The cost of these prisons is put at £2.3 billion, while a further £500 million is to be spent on refurbishing the current prison estate.

In 1990 a Conservative White Paper conceded that “prison is an expensive way of making bad people worse”. Would it not then make more sense to spend money treating the root causes of crime rather than wasting it in a vain attempt to contain the increasing legions of offenders?

Sources

Home Office
Ministry of Justice
Statista
Bristol Live

Chris Waller - Permission granted to freely distribute this article for non-commercial purposes if attributed to Chris Waller, unedited and copied in full, including this notice.

Members can discuss this and other articles on the economics forum at International Mensa.