Prisoners are easy targets

Last week the Justice Secretary, Chris Grayling, outlined changes to the rules regulating prisoners’ privileges. The changes, which include requiring all convicted prisoners to wear uniforms for the first two weeks of their sentences and restricting access to television, films and private cash, are designed to make prison more punitive.

Not many people will lose sleep about prisons ditching their Sky TV subscriptions, or inmates losing the ability to watch 18 certificate films, and rightly so. But other elements of the changes are misjudged to the point of danger. The move is especially depressing because it appears to have been conceived for political reasons, and because it is symptomatic of an unpleasant instinct within the Conservative party to prove its toughness by attacking easy targets.

There are currently three levels of privileges available to prisoners in UK jails: basic, standard and enhanced. When inmates enter prison they are automatically put on the “standard” level, which gives them various entitlements including access to private cash and permission to wear their own clothes. The changes to the Incentives and Earned Privileges scheme, which come into effect in November, will create a new “entry” level which will be much closer to the austere “basic” level (the punishment for poor behaviour) by denying new inmates access to these entitlements at the beginning of their sentences. After two weeks the behaviour of the prisoners will be reviewed: if they have cooperated with the prison regime and engaged in rehabilitation they will progress to the standard level, and if not they will drop to basic.

Grayling justified the changes on the basis that they will contribute to the government’s “rehabilitation revolution” and reduce reoffending (a theme developed in the Queen’s speech yesterday with a new commitment to extend probation services to all offenders after release). He argues that prisoners are currently rewarded for the absence of bad behaviour (by being immediately placed on the standard level), whereas in the future they will have to earn these perks by positively engaging in activities which will support their rehabilitation. But if his priority is reducing reoffending, the changes are wrongheaded. Research indicates that maintaining contact with family during a prison sentence can reduce the likelihood of an individual reoffending by 39 per cent. Depriving prisoners of the means to maintain these links by reducing the number of family visits they get and limiting their access to private cash (spent on phone calls to the outside world) will not serve the cause of rehabilitation.

The decision to make conditions harsher for prisoners at the start of their sentences is particularly dispiriting. It is well known that a disproportionate amount of self-harm occurs in the early stages of custody, when prisoners are generally at their most psychologically vulnerable—in 2011, 23 per cent of self-harm incidents occurred during an individual’s first month in prison. Cutting new prisoners off from their families and marking them out from the rest of the prison population by putting them in uniforms may well increase incidences of self-harm. This is not evidence-based policymaking: prison professionals know that the priority when dealing with new inmates at the beginning of their sentences is to “stabilise” the individual and help them adjust to the custodial environment.

Unfortunately, it is difficult to escape the conclusion that these changes to the IEP scheme are in large part motivated by political considerations. It is hardly coincidental that the policy was unveiled just days before a round of local elections in which the Conservatives feared they would be outflanked on the right by UKIP (a fear that turned out to be justified). Talking tough on law and order plays well with Conservative heartlands, where increasing numbers of voters have become disillusioned with what they see as an abandonment of traditional Tory values under David Cameron’s leadership.

Grayling’s prison policy fits into a wider Conservative strategy designed to rebuild the party’s support on the right. When he announced the policy last week his language seemed to have borrowed liberally from the welfare debate, where the party has also tried to improve its reputation on the right by casting a distinction between “strivers” and “shirkers”: “It is not right that some prisoners appear to be spending hours languishing in their cells and watching daytime television while the rest of the country goes out to work.”

But setting one’s face against two groups who are either unable to vote (prisoners) or not politically mobilised (welfare dependents) is no great show of strength or political courage. The Conservatives’ choice of political opponents speaks volumes about their current weakness and lack of self-confidence.