What Michael Gove didn’t say about the prison system and cutting jail numbers
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Version 0 of 1. Martin Kettle’s piece ignored three key issues missing in Michael Gove’s conference speech (Gove is a true reformer. We should be cheering him on, 9 October). First, it was Mr Gove’s predecessors who presided over a prison system that – as recent reports from HM chief inspector of prisons and the Harris review have shown – is in dire straits. Is Mr Gove saying his predecessors were wrong and, if so, in the spirit of the new, honest, political times, why doesn’t he say so? Of course, that is something he won’t do. Second, nowhere in the speech did he address the issue of democratic accountability. Both the chief inspector of prisons and the Harris review point to the systemic non-implementation of recommendations by official inquiries over the years, which has had devastating consequences for prisoners in terms of self-harm and self-inflicted deaths, a point made consistently by the charity Inquest. This lack of accountability has been reinforced by the scandal of prisoners’ confidential phone calls to their MPs being routinely recorded and listened to, a point also ignored by Mr Gove. Third, he had nothing to say about miscarriages of justice, nor about corporate and white-collar criminality. As usual, the focus was on the poor and their so-called dysfunctional families. The systemic criminality of the rich, many of whom come from allegedly well-adjusted families, was, as ever, ignored in the speech.Professor Joe SimLiverpool John Moores University • Martin Kettle is right that we should be cheering Michael Gove on and trying to help him succeed in reducing unsustainable prison numbers. It is worth studying recent history in the US, where numbers in prison have at last started coming down. The drivers are not reform of the prisons themselves, but sentencing reform and investing in local community support for offenders. Recently, the governor of California refused to ratify legislation to create yet more criminal offences, because, as he put it, “Over the last several decades California’s criminal code has grown to over 5,000 separate provisions, covering almost every conceivable form of human misbehavior”. We also leap to create new crimes – a recently passed law automatically criminalises teenagers who send nude pictures of themselves to a classmate. There is much that can be done to reduce prison numbers through system reform, including giving local communities more power. But, to make a significant difference, we need to bite the bullet and reform sentencing too.Penelope GibbsDirector, Transform Justice |