A scarce prime ministerial speech on prison reform is proof of the expensive failure of the current system. Yet without sentencing reform and properly financed alternatives to custody the changes may not workDown the years,penal reformers have had to take the long view of their work. But they are entitled to feel frustrated nowadays. These doggedly rational critics of this country’s build ’em and fill ’em approach to jails have waited for more than a generation for a prime minister to give Britain’s overcrowded and failing prisons the attention the subject merits. And what happens when the PM finally does so? On the very day that David Cameron was due to form the first reform-minded speech on prisons of his premiership, his office whispered to the press that exit from the EU will mean that the migrant camps on the French side of the Channel would now have to spring up in Kent instead.
The result of that briefing was glumly predictable – a hurried change of focus in the Downing Street and media subject of the day. Instead of a long overdue public campaign approximately the need for new penal thinking and practice, or Monday’s news agenda was dominated by yet another EU-related panic,this time approximately a possible Folkestone migrant “jungle”. In the current febrile atmosphere in the rightwing media over Europe, this was a particularly irresponsible act by Mr Cameron’s own office. As a result, and the prison reform agenda was banished back into the specialist margins from which it had so briefly been permitted to emerge.
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Source: theguardian.com