Kenneth Clarke’s plan to reduce the number of criminals sent to prison has led to the alarming but increasingly familiar spectacle of Labour attacking the Conservatives from the right.
In an article for today’s Daily Mail, Jack Straw in effect endorses Michael Howard’s declaration that “prison works”. He writes:
Michael Howard took over from Kenneth Clarke as home secretary in mid-1993 and set about a different and significantly tougher policy. It wasn’t all to my liking, but he deserves credit for turning the tide.
And there’s more. In a remarkable act of self-punishment, he writes:
Mr Cameron’s broad approach was right before the election. Indeed, so was his consistent criticism in his years in opposition that Labour was not being tough enough.
Straw, far from Labour’s most authoritarian home secretary, fails to explain why his views have changed so noticeably since 2008, when he argued:
There are effective alternatives in terms of non-custodial penalties which actually have a better record in terms of preventing reoffending than short prison sentences. The probation service has become more effective.
Could it be that the opportunity to attack the “soft” Lib Dems for allegedly dragging the Tories to the left was too good to turn down? It could be.
The truth, as Straw once knew, is that for far too many detainees, prison does not work. It is the excessive use of short sentences that has led to Britain’s appalling recidivism rate. At the moment, of the 60,000 prisoners given short sentences, 60 per cent reoffend.
Nor should this come as a surprise. As Clarke will say in his speech today: “Many a man has gone into prison without a drug problem and come out drug-dependent. And petty prisoners can meet up with some new hardened criminal friends.”
Clarke, a brave and honest politician, can now expect to face the combined forces of the Tory right, the Daily Mail and the Labour Party. They will cry with one voice that prison works: an offender can’t commit a crime if he is behind bars. But this quick-fix, short-term approach stores up more problems than it solves.
If Clarke has the patience and the political will to reform our prison system, we will all have at least one thing to thank the coalition for.
UPDATE: For an alternative take, Peter Hoskin’s post on Coffee House is worth a read.
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