Tackling the crisis in prison, probation & courts
A new government, especially one that has been out of power for 14 years, is bound to want to make big changes. The Labour Government elected last July has been at pains to bemoan the state of the criminal justice system that it inherited. While nobody can deny that our prisons (chronic overcrowding, impoverished regimes), probation (chronic understaffing, poor performance) and courts (unprecedented backlogs) were at their lowest point in recent history, those of us in the field are more interested in how they can get back on track than in why they have been allowed to deteriorate so badly.
This post summarises what we know about the government’s criminal justice plans for 2025.
Prisons
There was a consensus that our prisons were at crisis point last summer and the government has stabilised the situation by implementing a medium-term policy of releasing lower risk prisoners at the 40% mark of their sentence instead of half way – the so called SD40 scheme. This approach has at least stabilised the prison population as you can see from my chart below, updated with yesterday’s figures. However, as far as we can tell from HMI Prisons reports, it hasn’t done anything to improve regimes yet.
Faced with the choice of increasing our prison capacity or sending less people to prison, the Government has prioritised the former, promising 14,000 more prison places by 2031. It has, however, given some comfort to those of us who would like to see less use of incarceration by commissioning a Sentencing Review led by former Lord Chancellor David Gauke. The review is required to follow “3 core principles to ensure a sustainable justice system”:
- make sure prison sentences punish serious offenders and protect the public, and there is always the space in prison for the most dangerous offenders
- look at what more can be done to encourage offenders to turn their backs on a life of crime, and keep the public safe by reducing reoffending
- explore tougher punishments outside of prison to make sure these sentences cut crime while making the best use of taxpayers’ money
Probation
The probation service has had a tumultuous last decade, de-stabilised by its privatisation under Conservative Justice Secretary Chris Grayling in February 2015 and its renationalisation in June 2021. The impact on staff has been unrelenting with many choosing to leave the service. Despite various recruitment drives, the probation service remains chronically under-staffed and performance is at an all-time low. The prison early release scheme has added so substantially to the workload, that the service formally initiated a “Reset” in July last year, essentially meaning a further reduction in service for those on supervision. The new Government is yet to tackle this issue, announcing only that it will aim to “onboard at least 1,000 new trainee Probation Officers by the end of March 2025”. The most recent workforce figures (published in November 2024) show that there were just 5,436 full time equivalent probation officers in post on 30 September 2024, a shortfall of 1,723 or 24% on the target of 7,159.
Courts
As readers will be well aware, the backlog in the courts is also at unprecedented levels. The latest data which shows the Crown Court backlog on 30 September 2024 illustrates the scale of the problem: there are 73,105 open cases compared to 40,862 in January 2020, immediately before the pandemic. Despite numerous initiatives, the backlog grew by over 10% in the last year. You can see the detailed figures below. The Government has committed to more court sitting days in the year ahead but is aware that many courts are not open to their current full capacity because of a shortage of legal representatives.
It has also announced an Independent Review of the Criminal Courts to be carried out by Sir Brian Leveson, Former President of the Queen’s Bench Division and. perhaps best known to the public at large for chairing the public inquiry into the culture, practice and ethics of the British press in the aftermath of the phone hacking revelations. Promising “bold thinking”, the review is expected to make fundamental changes such as reclassifying a number of offences so they can be heard by Magistrates’ Courts or new “intermediate courts” where cases could be heard by a judge flanked by magistrates, in an attempt to speed up the length of trials. These would apply to some criminal cases that are too serious for magistrates courts but are no longer deemed serious enough for the crown court.
Conclusions
It is clear that this a critical year for criminal justice and that the key to getting the system back of a more stable footing will be reducing demand. Currently, the fact that all parts of the system are under pressure results in a vicious circle of plummeting performance. The Court backlogs result in more people in prison on remand. The emergency response to tackle this – early release measures – lead to heaping more pressure on the probation service. Probation officers have less time and resources to help those on supervision which leads to more offending which adds to the court backlogs.
In reality, we cannot expect to see the key indicators improve much in 2025, but if we see a stabilisation and increased recruitment (of prison and probation officers and legal representatives), we may start to have more hope for the rest of the decade.
One Response
If a murderer got 23 years in 2013 will anything change for them