Michael Gove has a vision for reforming prisons – and justice

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jul/19/michael-gove-justice-prison-system

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What has happened to Britain’s criminal justice system over the past five years is a disgrace. Universal access to justice is the hallmark not only of a just society, but also a prosperous one. The indivisibility and universality of the rule of law is the precondition for order, trust and social association on which all else is built. Equally, punishment must be proportionate and fair and those who are incarcerated must have the prospect of atonement and rehabilitation. As Churchill once famously said, the “treatment of crime and criminals is one of the most unfailing tests of the civilisation of a country… there is treasure if only you can find it in the heart of every person”. Rehabilitation must be at the heart of the prison experience.

Britain fails to meet these standards. Justice is increasingly the preserve of the rich who can pay the hourly rates of our top barristers and solicitors, while the mass of the population, now ineligible for dramatically cut legal aid, has to accept multiple injustices because redress is too slow and expensive.

The court system creaks. Its waste and inefficiency are notorious. The Crown Prosecution Service and Serious Fraud Office are embarrassingly under-resourced and ineffective. Prisons are so overcrowded and cells so filthy that many have become places of “violence, squalor and idleness” in the words of the departing chief inspector of prisons, Nick Hardwick.

In any single week, there are four or five deaths, 300 assaults and 70 assaults on prison officers, of which nine are serious. The rehabilitation revolution the government promised in 2010 has not even begun, says Hardwick. It is an across-the-board disaster, a standing reproach to what Britain has become.

In effective political hands, all this could have profoundly embarrassed the government. Carelessness about criminal justice is first cousin to carelessness about social justice – they spring from the same libertarian philosophy. The priority is not justice and the public infrastructure to support it, in which virtue is achieved by collective effort. Rather, virtue is the result of unalloyed private endeavour and justice should be paid for – except in extreme need – by individuals. The interdependence between publicly provided justice and economic and social dynamism is flatly denied. Any one of Labour’s leadership candidates, if they had chosen, could have opened all this up to telling effect.

But the two most challenging recent speeches on the purpose and shortcomings of the criminal justice system have not come from the British left, now afraid or unable to ask even the most basic questions about the linkages between a moral order and the good economy and society. They have come, unexpectedly, from Michael Gove, the new justice secretary and lord chancellor. On Friday, he acknowledged, unlike his predecessor, Chris Grayling, that the prison service is in crisis, accepted it as a damning challenge to one-nation conservatism and then set out an intriguing suite of potential reforms.

Entitling his speech with Churchill’s quote “The treasure in the heart of man – making prisons work”, he unblinkingly faced up to the deprived social backgrounds, poverty of educational achievement and high reoffending rates that define those who pass through prison. Prison as a place of enforced idleness and barely suppressed violence that endlessly recycles society’s misfits was of no use to anyone.

He declared himself sympathetic to the idea of earned release, so that prisoners committing themselves to learn and acquire skills would be set free early. He canvassed the idea of reproducing the model of academy schools and foundation hospitals, giving prisons more autonomy to allow good practice to surface. He floated the idea of selling off dank, old, inner-city prisons such as Pentonville, using the proceeds to build prisons whose architecture would favour the purpose of rehabilitation and learning and where drug-taking would be easier to control.

His earlier speech, What does a one-nation justice policy look like?, was no less intriguing. Observing that Britain had been forged by a commitment to the rule of law, he again acknowledged that a two-nation legal system was being created. He threw his weight behind all the various initiatives to make the court system less cumbersome and less crazily obstructive to the digital revolution. He promised to review the legal aid system, implicitly accepting that the cuts have gone too far.

Of course, some of what Gove complains about has been self-inflicted, courtesy of his own party. The indiscriminate cuts in legal aid – cumulatively 30% between 2012 and 2015 – have been damaging. Of course the slashing of the prison budget, so the ratio of officers to prisoners has fallen to one to five, was too brutal. Of course George Osborne in 2010 should have done what he did in the budget 10 days ago – substantially raised taxes – so that key areas such as prison and legal aid, central to our wellbeing as a civilisation, were better protected.

But Gove, offering up privatisation proceeds from selling inner-city prisons and insisting that the system can take no more cuts, may now be able to get a much better settlement from Osborne than his predecessors. There is still a need for departmental spending cuts, but less severe than between 2010 and 2015. The one-nation line he is developing has traction. My hunch is that he will get most of what he wants.

He also wants those who make their living from justice to join the government in closing the legal divide. He noted that some firms require their lawyers to offer 25 hours a year free, but that the general rule is much less – an hour a year, if that. The thinktank Respublica argues the lawyers should offer 25 hours of pro bono work a year as an agreed minimum, contrasting it with the 125 hours typically offered by US lawyers. Professionals and professionalism, argues Respublica, should be more than just ensuring that as many hours as possible are billable. They should also be about embodying universal justice. Gove echoed the point.

Meanwhile, progressive Britain, at least in the form of Labour, looks on. Leadership contender Jeremy Corbyn would certainly reverse the “cuts”, but it is hard to imagine him debating with any conviction what constitutes professionalism or how to restructure the prison service. Equally, the other contenders would not want to risk being “soft on crime”, allowing Gove to occupy territory that could have been theirs. The lesson is stark. One-nation Toryism, genuinely delivered, could marginalise Labour for decades. Time for the British left to get much smarter, much savvier and much braver.