Having become Prime Minister on 24 July and nominated a Cabinet of fellow Tory hardliners, Boris Johnson rapidly set out his stall on a few issues other than the main agenda item of Brexit. Inevitably, this included a bit of bluster about crime and how every other government prior to now had been too soft, but that from henceforth more criminals would be locked up for longer and treated more harshly. Enter the new line-up of Robert Buckland as Justice Minister, Priti Patel as Home Secretary and Lucy Frazer as Prisons Minister.
On 2 August Patel told the Daily Mail she was declaring a new and harsher war on those who break the law: ‘Quite frankly, with more police officers out there and greater police presence, I want them to literally feel terror at the thought of committing offences.’
This was swiftly followed by a series of announcements which mainly recycled earlier Tory promises of more police and prison officers, along with 10,000 more prison places, such as the plan to build a 1,440-place category C prison next to high security Full Sutton.
Then in mid-September, Johnson told the Sunday Telegraph that the Queen’s Speech would contain plans for a new Sentencing Bill to include: more use of whole-life tariffs for people who kill children; an expansion of the use of sentences with a two-thirds point as the earliest release date, together with more ‘earned release’ schemes; the use of ‘sobriety tags’ to monitor alcohol abstinence orders; an expansion of the list of convictions which can be referred back to the appeal court by victims on the basis the sentence is ‘unduly lenient’.
Setting out its own criminal justice plans at conference, Labour also promised more prison officers, as well as more courts and more convictions for rape. Shadow Justice Minister Richard Burgon MP pledged in September that if elected Labour will send fewer people to prison to serve short sentences and will cancel the planned 10,000 more prison places. Presumably hoping no-one would remember a very similar promise made by Jack Straw prior to Labour’s victory in 1997, which was immediately reneged on, Burgon also promised that a future Labour government would not build any more private prisons and would bring all existing private prisons back under government control.
The combined prison populations of England/Wales, Scotland and the north of Ireland are around 93,000. Scotland has the highest rate of imprisonment in Western Europe at 150 per 100,000 people, with England/Wales second at 139. This does not include those held in immigration removal centres or released from prison but subject to probation. Despite cuts in everything from offending behaviour programmes to food, the average annual cost of a prison place in England and Wales is still £40,843. The National Audit Office says there is no link between the prison population and levels of crime. Instead, the prison system serves to warehouse and terrorise the working class. The Labour Party plans to maintain this regime of terror at the same level while Johnson’s Conservatives want to ramp up the ‘terror’ to yet new heights.
Nicki Jameson
Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! No 272, October/November 2019
