The Independent Sentencing Review’s final report, published yesterday, made a series of recommendations intended to tackle the current prisons crisis.
This is essential, not just to ensure that we don’t run out of prison places but also to make prisons more rehabilitative environments. Reducing the overall number of people in prison would ease some of the pressure on the prison estate, enabling more people to regularly get out of their cells and access education and training.
Reducing the use of short prison sentences and of recall, both recommendations of David Gauke’s review, would also reduce the churn of people coming in and out of prison. This would allow prison staff to focus support on the people who will be there long enough for it to make a difference.
Plans for earned release
So far, so good. But one of the most keenly anticipated elements of the review, and the one that was of most interest to Prisoners’ Education Trust, is what the review calls “earned progression”, whereby people in prison can earn early release by engaging with the prison regime.
This, and the role that education could play in enabling people to earn early release, was the focus of PET’s submission to the sentencing review. We’ve strongly supported this approach in principle, while highlighting the potential risks and challenges (most recently in this article for the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies).
The review’s report does indeed recommend introducing a system of “earned progression”, both for those serving a standard determinate sentence and those serving an extended determinate sentence.
People on standard determinate sentences are split into two groups, as is currently the case:
- For people who have committed less serious crimes, it recommends release at one-third of their sentence for those who earn it, and half of their sentence for those who do not.
- For people who have committed more serious crimes, it recommends release at the halfway point for those who earn it, and two-thirds for those who do not.
For people on an extended determinate sentence, it recommends that they should be eligible for release by the Parole Board after half of their sentence if they earn it, or two-thirds if they do not.
The Ministry of Justice’s response
The Ministry of Justice has, however, already announced that it will not accept these recommendations in full.
People serving a standard determinate sentence will not, as Gauke has proposed, be automatically released at the halfway point, or two thirds of their sentence for those who have committed more serious crimes, if they don’t earn an earlier release. People could, therefore, serve longer than this if they behave poorly in prison. A “tougher adjudication regime” will be introduced to address issues with behaviour.
They have also said that people on extended determinate sentences will not be eligible for release until they have served at least two-thirds of their sentence, as is the case currently, and will therefore be excluded from the earned progression approach.
A missed opportunity?
Whoever ends up being eligible, the key question for the implementation of this approach is what people in prison would have to do to earn early release. We had hoped that accessing education and training would be at the heart of this, given extensive evidence that education is effective at reducing reoffending.
But the review does not quite go that far. It says that to earn early release people in prison will need to engage constructively with the prison regime. To achieve this, they will need to comply with prison rules and to “engage in purposeful activity and attend any required work, education, treatments and/or training obligations where these are available”.
This last phrase – “where these are available” – is a necessary caveat in the current circumstances. We know that prison education departments do not have the capacity to significantly increase provision and it would be unfair and counterproductive to offer early release for accessing education and then not make it universally available. The best way to address this would be to invest in making more educational opportunities available, but at the moment funding is not available to do this.
Given this, there is a risk that many people will not have an opportunity to genuinely “earn” their release by accessing education or training. That’s not their fault – and many, many people in prison would much rather be learning than sitting in their cell – but it will mean that education and learning will too often continue to be peripheral to prison regimes, rather than at its heart.
That, for me, gets to the key issue with “earned progression”. It’s not wholly, or maybe even primarily, about getting people in prison to change their approach. It’s about forcing the system itself to change. If you build access to early release around access to education, training and treatment, then the system will have to make those things available to prevent another capacity crisis developing. That benefits people in prison, but it also benefits us all by reducing reoffending.
Getting it right in the future
The review’s report recognises this and goes on to say that “as prison capacity eases and fuller regimes become possible, compliance requirements for earned release should become more demanding”. For me, framing it as “demanding” is not necessarily helpful. But supporting people to access education and training to enable their early release would be a positive step as and when it is possible.
On this issue, then, the report is a step in the right direction and recognises current challenges, but in the face of resource constraints it does not go as far as it might have. So the Ministry of Justice should take the baton and run with it. Invest in education and training, build up capacity, and then – when that’s in place – enable people in prison to earn release by doing what they need to do to thrive on release.
That would be genuinely transformational, both for the system and for the people caught up in it.
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