Although crime and punishment are not top of either main party’s agenda for the December 2019 election, the Conservative Party Manifesto, which was published on 24 November, nonetheless included a long list of future plans, most of which it had already announced.
These include:
- 10,000 more prison places.
- A review of the parole system to ‘improve accountability and public safety’.
- The introduction of a new court order ‘to target known knife carriers’, meaning they can be repeatedly stopped and searched.
- An end to automatic halfway release from prison for ‘serious crimes’. [This effectively means that anyone convicted of a violent or sexual offence will get an Extended Determinate Sentence. This in itself will clearly increase prison numbers.]
- Whole life tariffs for anyone who kills a child. [This is likely to be subject to legal challenge.]
- Increased penalties for foreign national prisoners who return after being deported.
- Support for school teachers to ‘enforce discipline’, together with a system of ‘new alternative provision schools’ for those who do not behave as dictated, in addition to the already planned ‘Secure Schools’.
- A prisoner education service focused on work-based training and skills, with improved ‘employment opportunities for ex-offenders, including a job coach in each prison’. [There is no mention of what type of job opportunities or what level or remuneration, so the likelihood is that this will be minimum wage exploitation.]
- More use of electronic tagging for ‘criminals serving time outside jail’, including the use of ‘sobriety tags’. [This does not mean that anyone in prison will get out earlier ‘on tag’ but that those released at the usual time are more likely to have a tagging condition added on to their licence.]
- Tougher community sentences with stricter curfews and more hours of community payback.
- Continuing the ban on prisoners voting. [Presumably just in case any prisoners wanted to voice their discontent with any of the other proposals!]
The promise to create 10,000 more prison places had already been made on various occasions by Conservative spokespeople, and in September 2019, Labour’s Shadow Justice Secretary Richard Burgon declared that, if elected, Labour would cancel this and send fewer people to prison. However, the Labour Manifesto, which was published a few days before the Conservative one, says nothing about this. In fact there are few concrete promises in relation to prisons in the Labour Manifesto, other than to ‘restore total prison officer numbers to 2010 levels’ and to ‘introduce a presumption against prison sentences of six months or less for non-violent and non-sexual offences’.
The most radical sounding Labour promise is to ‘bring PFI prisons back in-house and [build] no new private prisons’. Exactly the same promise was made by Jack Straw prior to Labour’s victory in 1997, and was immediately reneged on.
Labour also says it will ‘reunify probation and guarantee a publicly run, locally accountable probation service’; however, although the Conservative Manifesto makes no mention at all of probation, the reversal of the part-privatisation of the service – which has been universally judged to be a chaotic failure – had already been announced by the government in May 2019.
For many who are looking to the current Labour Party for something better than the Blair years, during which the government created 3,000 new criminal offences and presided over a near-doubling of the prison population, there is a glaring omission in the Manifesto. In 2003 Labour Home Secretary David Blunkett created the most arbitrarily punitive criminal sentence Britain has seen for decades – the Indeterminate Sentence for Public Protection (IPP). The IPP was so blatantly oppressive that it was abolished in 2012 by the ConDem Coalition government; however all those already sentenced remain subject to it. The Labour Manifesto does not mention IPP prisoners, but if a Corbyn-led party wants to show that it is really different to that of Tony Blair, it could start by promising action to ensure all those prisoners still stuck in the IPP trap are given a definite release date.
Nicki Jameson
