“Only two things bother me, to be honest,” said the man I’ll call Darren. Darren was a drug dealer, but also a police informant, so I reserved my judgement on the honesty bit. “The first thing is the Proceeds of Crime Act,” he explained. “That’s brutal, innit? Old Bill taking your car and your telly? The other thing is prison, of course. I fucking hate being banged up.” Nothing else? “Nothing,” he replied, laughing. “Absolutely fuck all. Put me on a tag. I don’t care. Suspended sentences? Probation? What a joke.”
I spent years talking to people like Darren. Over a beer. In interview rooms. In the back of police cars. I’ve listened to criminals having hair-raisingly candid conversations, courtesy of the listening devices we planted in their houses. I also remember doing the occasional “gate arrest” at Wormwood Scrubs. These occur when an inmate’s wanted by another force and arrested immediately upon release — sometimes without the prisoner’s prior knowledge. Our man, having just finished a six-stretch, gazed longingly at the pub at the end of Du Cane Road. It was a traditional stop for newly-released cons to enjoy a pint. Then he clocked us getting out of our unmarked car. You’ve never seen true misery etched on a man’s face until you’ve done a gate arrest. So, yes, Darren the informant was being honest: I know how much criminals hate prison.
Which is why I chuckled when I read David Gauke’s entirely predictable prison Sentencing Review. Gauke, a Mayite Tory of the wettest kind, proposes a package of reforms aimed at creating prison spaces through — you guessed it — a brace of early release schemes. He also suggests sentences of less than a year be scrapped entirely. Gauke proposes to reform community punishment via vague promises of “technological progress” (despite Serco being fined for failing to tag prisoners) and investment in the probation service. It’s the usual bromides from the militant wing of the penal reform establishment. This lobby has informed prison policy for decades, and only ever fails upwards.
There’s one shiny policy in the report, clearly added to distract journalists and commentators: the voluntary chemical castration of sex offenders. This is a good idea, but it doesn’t mitigate releasing every other flavour of criminal too. This is, Darren told me, because they don’t care about non-custodial sentences. They really, genuinely don’t. Probation? Please. The probation service refuses to accept that any criminal is beyond rehabilitation. For them, the word “recidivist” simply doesn’t exist. This isn’t an ex-policeman’s bias; I’ve had the policy explained to me by a senior probation officer. “What about serial rapists?” I asked her. She gritted her teeth and repeated the party line. “Nobody is beyond rehabilitation.” It was like talking to a cultist.
Criminals are acutely aware of this orthodoxy and, if they can be bothered to make appointments (online, of course), they’ll tell their well-meaning probation officer exactly what they need to hear. Then it’s off to the pub to sell drugs, or indulge in a spot of consequence-free shoplifting. This is part of the wider problem with prison reform, which Gauke’s recommendations typify: the Government wants to save money while displaying a socially liberal distaste for incarceration. It’s not that the lanyard classes don’t accept the necessity of prison, but only consider it an extreme sanction. For them, it’s something reserved for the worst types of criminals (or people who post idiotic but politically forbidden posts on social media).
Yet on sentencing, Gauke is catastrophically wrong. Whatever he claims, short sentences really do have a role to play. Offenders given, say, a six-month term will already have a lengthy criminal record. It’s a circuit breaker. But if short sentences have limited efficacy in terms of reoffending, but what about the victims of crime, the communities blighted by recidivist offenders?
I once worked on a west London council estate. One of our regulars was a 19 year old given to criminal damage, robbery and stealing cars. He was violent, clever and sly, often targeting elderly women for their pension money. You won’t be even remotely surprised to learn he later became a prominent gang member, dealing in drugs and firearms. Even the “dogs on the street”, as they say in Belfast, knew this was his career trajectory, and no earnest probation officer was going to stop him from fulfilling his potential. As police officers, we made it our mission to put the teenager in prison. He was gone for six months, during which time the estate felt palpably different. The crime rate also dropped significantly. This was due to a single kid, who required a lengthy criminal record (and hundreds of hours of police time) before a court was prepared to send him to Feltham.
So no, my concern wasn’t for the offender — it was for his victims. I’ve seen how locking up vicious, antisocial offenders offers respite. What about them, Mr Gauke? Not that we should really be surprised. The British criminal justice system is like a crumbling house with the world’s worst plumbing. The police, inexperienced and badly led, are meant to see their role as protecting the law abiding from criminals. They’re pumped, via leaky pipes, into the courts. The courts, run by lawyers paid by the hour, tend to endlessly re-route the u-bend. The courts feed into the prison service, who view their role as keeping a lid on the madhouse until their charges are released on licence. This feeds, via a septic tank, into the probation service, charged with the Herculean task of reintegration and mentoring.
Punishment, in this context, is conspicuous by its absence. Again, criminals know this, even if David Gauke doesn’t. Unlike criminal justice, the criminal mindset is about results not process. It’s clever. It views rules merely as weaknesses to be gamed. Any half-decent criminal would run rings around the millionaires on Dragon’s Den. They understand how drug markets work, how to safely fence a stolen Land Rover. They can run multi-platform retail fraud schemes. They’re fully equipped to exploit a criminal justice system designed by David Gauke.
As for the prisons themselves? As an anticorruption investigator, I saw how the prison service was unremittingly hostile from an intelligence perspective. More than a few of our cases involved prison officers assisting offenders. The prison service, like the police, was hollowed out by austerity. Experienced officers left, replaced by a younger and more impressionable cohort. The recent case of Keri Pegg is instructive. Pegg, who joined the Prison Service as a graduate entrant, was made governor in only six years. She’s now a prisoner herself, after being caught having an affair with a major drug dealer. As part of her defence, she stated how her “progressive approach” upset senior prison service figures. Quite. My team once ran a surveillance operation on a prison to track a target visiting an inmate. We ran our plan via a police prison liaison officer to explore opportunities for assistance. “No way,” came the reply. “The screws control heroin distribution inside, so they monitor the carparks for potential police activity. I’d stay well clear.” As I said, the criminal justice system is a badly plumbed house, and the septic tank leaks everywhere.
“The criminal justice system is a badly plumbed house, and the septic tank leaks everywhere.”
Then there’s rehabilitation. Yes, it can rebuild their lives, but it’s still a roll of the dice, in more ways than one given the expense required. Criminal lifestyles are exactly that: lifestyles. Counselling or learning a new skill are unlikely to persuade career criminals to work a nine-to-five like everyone else. It may be uncomfortable to say: but there are too many criminals for whom “rehabilitation” as currently constituted is unlikely to work. Yet, as we have seen, that’s taboo across Whitehall and beyond.
Are there alternatives? Possibly. It would require intrusive intervention and lifestyle management around work, accommodation and healthcare. But even if that worked, and that’s by no means guaranteed, you’re still left with a massive bill at the end — to the point where you risk rewarding those who break the law, to the millions detriment of taxpayers who don’t. The report mentions one possible sanction with teeth: fines and restrictions on travel and driving. Yet sanctions must also come with the means to enforce them, and be in no doubt: this work will fall to over-stretched police officers.
And anyway, not even the good ideas really deal with what I call the “spectrum” of criminality. After all, the very term “criminal” is pejorative. The British criminal justice establishment tends to fixate on socially troubled people as opposed to career criminals. These are people who habitually find themselves in court for minor offences and are, eventually, jailed. They might be homeless and often suffer from mental health or dependency issues. Or they might just be listless and foolish. There’s excellent work being done with these kinds of offenders by charities, who I don’t see mentioned in this review, who offer common-sense solutions like skills and training mentoring, as well as treatment for dependency issues. Prison isn’t the most suitable place for many “accidental” criminals with chaotic lifestyles to put their lives back on track — though sometimes establishment sympathy bleeds into excuse-making. Where is the line between personal and societal failure? And where does protecting the public fit in?
To me, the Government appears to have conflated two problems — “accidental” and career criminals — yet proscribed a single solution. This is a mistake. Sometimes, the only tool available to police to take a criminal out of circulation is a provable offence carrying a short sentence. These, under Gauke’s proposals, will no longer exist. The career criminal I mentioned earlier, that granny-robbing future gangster? He’d be at home, playing his Xbox and waiting to slip off his tag.
And so the Government will shave money off of the prison budget, no doubt to ameliorate Labour’s backbench insurgency over benefits. Carefully gamed, the inevitable spike in crime figures caused by releasing thousands of criminals early, aided and abetted by ineffective police performance, will hopefully be forgotten by the next election. In fact, I suspect the next prison review, written by a “Blue Labour” figure with more traditional views, will duly arrive by about 2028. It’s just a shame that our political class only ever seems to listen to people like David Gauke.
