Commission Suggests Radical Change In UK Prisons
Professor David Wilson, chair of the Commission on English Prisons Today, comments on criminal justice policy at Politics.co.uk.
“Since early in the 1990s, England and Wales has been set on a course towards becoming a jurisdiction which punishes excessively, harshly and with little attention paid to the relationship between legislation and the impact on prison numbers. The result is a crisis of overcrowding which threatens to bring the penal system to its knees. We now jail more of our population than almost any other country in western Europe, despite the fact that there is no evidence to say we are any more crime-prone than our neighbouring countries.
“To counter this crisis of penal excess, the Commission advocates radical and transformational change, starting with a clear acknowledgement that criminal justice is a blunt tool which cannot in itself provide lasting solutions to the problem of crime. The current criminal justice system not only wastes money but it is overly centralised and driven by misleading and often meaningless targets. We advocate the breaking up of the National Offender Management Service and its replacement with an agenda rooted in localism and in engaging with communities to seek meaningful outcomes. Less crime, safer communities and fewer people in prison should be an achievable future.”
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