UK Justice Secretary Jack Straw has ditched plans for three giant ‘Titan’ prisons costing £1.2 billion as the Government spending squeeze begins to bite.

Advanced proposals to build three, four-storey, 2,500 place jails will be dropped next week in a major U-turn.   Mr Straw will tell Parliament he has opted instead to build five smaller prisons, each holding 1,500 inmates – as many as the largest existing prisons in England and Wales.

Ministry of Justice sources said the decision was made in response to local opposition and criticism from penal reform groups and were not linked to funding. But the Tories said Mr Straw was responding to a £400 million “black hole” in prison finances.

A consultation paper on prison expansion published in June last year said each Titan would be housed on a giant 50-acre site and hold a cluster of smaller units holding around 500 inmates.   Planned locations were near the country’s major population centres in London, the West Midlands and the North West. New prison places are needed to fill a predicted 13,600 shortfall by 2014. The prison population crisis has meant that since June 2007, 52,117 criminals have been let out up to 18 days early.

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In Wales, the union Napo fears that more than 200 jobs will be lost over the next two years, leaving already hard-pressed probation officers with far too heavy a case load to monitor offenders properly.  Report from WalesOnline.

Budget plans agreed by the Ministry of Justice and its agency Noms (National Offender Management Service), which is responsible for both the prison and probation services, will see cash cuts in all four regions.  In Gwent, for example, the overall budget is due to reduce from £22.8m in the financial year that began last week to £20m in two years’ time.

Mike Dunne, co-chair of the Gwent and Glamorgan branch of Napo, said: “We are extremely concerned about the potential impact of these cuts on our members’ ability to do their jobs properly. There is evidence that increasing workloads for probation officers results in an increase in crime. Coupled with the recession, which in itself is likely to result in more crime, there could be very serious consequences. The public will undoubtedly be at greater risk …

Mr Dunne said that Jack Straw, the Justice Secretary, had stated that the public sector, like the private sector, should expect job losses in the recession.  “That’s all very well,” said Mr Dunne. “But whereas when car sales go down and demand decreases, there isn’t the need to employ so many workers in car factories, the same does not apply in the probation service. We still have the same number of clients to deal with, probably more” …

Justice Minister David Hanson, the MP for Delyn, said: “There is absolutely no evidence in the figures cited by Napo relating to the number of new crimes that would be committed and suggestions that there will be a 25% reduction in supervision are totally unsubstantiated.  “There has been a 70% increase in probation funding in real terms over the last 10 years and an increase of more than a third in staff.   “Re-offending rates are down, successful drug treatments and offending behaviour programmes are up, and the target for Community Payback is being exceeded.   “The Government will not do anything to endanger these successes in the future.  “Public protection is the main priority for the probation service and it will not be put at risk.”

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Plans to build three Titan prisons to hold 7,500 inmates should be scrapped and replaced with a network of smaller “academy” prisons, according to former Tory cabinet minister Jonathan Aitken.  The Guardian reports.

The report, Locked up Potential, from a prison reform working group chaired by Aitken, who served an 18-month sentence for perjury, says in future prisons have to move to a radically different, more purposeful design to end the human warehousing now endemic in a £5bn a year and failing prison system.   “At the worm’s eye level I observed the pressures prison managements and staff have to face,” said Aitken. “On the whole they coped decently, but inadequately, with a daily chaos of chronic overcrowding, endemic drug abuse, widespread mental illness, and volatile mood swings.”   He said it was hardly surprising prison officers had to concentrate on containment and warehousing because, under the present overloaded system, the rehabilitation of offenders was “a political myth belied by the facts and figures”.

The report for Iain Duncan Smith’s Centre for Social Justice says the jails in England and Wales have become “conveyor belts carrying the same repeat offenders in and out of custody over and over again”.   Aitken’s report says the national offender management service [NOMS] has been a failure and should be abolished. In its place should be a network of community prison and rehabilitation trusts – similar to local National Health trusts. These new trusts should oversee a network of smaller community prisons for offenders, paid for by scrapping the £2.3bn Titan prisons project.

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Probation staff will struggle to stop criminals committing more crimes because of £3m worth of cuts, an English Member of Parliament warned last night.  Report from the Witney Gazette.

Thames Valley Probation Service is having to make the cuts over the next three years following a reduction in its budget from the Government. Four offices, including two in Oxford, may be shut under a review.   It is also feared up to 140 staff may lose their jobs and Banbury MP Tony Baldry said it would mean the probation service would struggle to monitor the 8,000 people a year it currently deals with …

Mr Baldry said he understood staff from closed offices might be relocated to a central base in Botley Road, Oxford, meaning they would have less time to monitor criminals outside the city. Mr Baldry said: “It will not be an improved service. “The whole point of local offender management is to have knowledge of the offender, local circumstances and their family.  Removing offices and staff is a retrograde step. It’s going to mean probation officers will spend all their time driving round the county. It will clearly damage offender management” …

Justice Minister David Hanson MP said: “Public protection is the main priority of the probation service and it will not be put at risk – offenders who pose the highest risk receive more intensive contact, with other resources being directed accordingly.”

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The credibility of community sentences in the UK is at stake because offenders who breach the orders are not dealt with firmly enough, a study says.

Experts from King’s College London examined Community Orders and Suspended Sentence Orders, which were introduced in England and Wales four years ago.  They require offenders to do unpaid work or undergo rehabilitation.  But a probation officer interviewed for the study said those under the orders left court “laughing their heads off”.   Offenders who were interviewed said they felt “relieved” when they were given an order instead of a jail sentence …

One probation officer said breaches were not dealt with seriously enough and “that gives completely the wrong message.  “You go to court for a breach and you don’t get sent to prison, you go back on the van next week and all your mates tell everybody else about it. It doesn’t have the deterrent effect that it’s meant to have.”   The most commonly suggested improvement to SSOs was that offenders who breached them should be sent to prison.  One officer said: “I know prisons are full, but they’re full with the wrong people. We need to send out the message that if you’ve got a suspended sentence and you breach it, you go to prison.”

The BBC report has a lot more detailed information.

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A women’s prison in England has failed to meet challenges from a “complex and growing” number of vulnerable inmates, a report by HM Inspector of Prisons says.  This from the BBC.

Staff at HMP Styal, in Cheshire, lack training and support to deal with the most “damaged” women, said Anne Owers … But the National Offender Management Service said “innovative” work at the prison had also been recognised … The announced inspection was carried out in September at the prison, which has 460 inmates – half of whom have issues with drugs.  The report said that prisoners’ level of vulnerability compared with other women’s jails was “extremely high”.  It concluded that HMP Styal “was not able to meet the scale and complexity of the needs of the women it held”.

On the Keller unit, for women with mental health issues, inspectors found the use of force by prison staff had “increased significantly”.  These inmates, some of whom had serious self-harming issues, were often forced to strip as part of the prison’s care plan.  The Keller prisoners were also locked up for most of the time …

Campaigners from Inquest, a charity which works with families of those who die in custody, have repeatedly protested outside the prison over the same issues.   Co-director Deborah Coles said: “As the report demonstrates, the response of the Prison Service does not reflect the seriousness of the failings that have been exposed both by inspection reports and inquests into the deaths of vulnerable women.  “What is needed is a fundamental rethink, not only about Styal but in the whole approach to women who offend, and the provision of alternatives to custody.”

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Public confidence in the criminal justice system is being eroded by the early release scheme used in England & Wales, the former Lord Chief Justice has told the BBC.

Almost 50,000 offenders have been let out under the scheme – known as End of Custody Licence (ECL).  It was introduced 18 months ago to reduce inmate numbers at the height of the prison overcrowding crisis.  But Lord Woolf said people had become “conditioned” to the early release scheme … “It’s now being used routinely and we’ve got embedded in our system a situation of the judges sending prisoners into prison by the front door and the executive releasing them by the back door, and that doesn’t make sense.”

Under ECL, less serious offenders can be freed two-and-a-half weeks before they have reached the halfway point of their prison term – the stage at which most prisoners are released. But John Thornhill, chairman of the Magistrates Association, said ECL blunted the impact of prison sentences and was a source of frustration for magistrates.  “To release (offenders) earlier on the decision of a member of the executive rather than by a member of the judiciary… does undermine confidence in those sentences,” he said.  Mr Thornhill called for ECL to be “phased out immediately” because there was now sufficient capacity in the prison system.

Figures published last week showed there were more than 2,000 spare jail places.

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Sir David Latham will take up his role as the new chairman of the Parole Board for England and Wales this week.  Report from eGov Monitor.

Sir David Latham’s appointment starts on 25 February and is initially for a period of one year. He succeeds Sir Duncan Nichol in this role.   On his appointment Sir David Latham said: “I am both honoured and delighted to be appointed to this position.  The Parole Board plays a hugely important role in protecting the public by risk assessing prisoners to decide whether they can be safely released into the community.    “I am greatly looking forward to working with Parole Board members and staff alike to ensure that the Board delivers its objectives.”

Justice Secretary Jack Straw said:    “I am pleased to announce Sir David as the new chairman of the Parole Board.  He brings more than 40 years of experience in the legal profession, including as a High Court and Appeal Court judge.”

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Foreign inmates jailed in the North of England are costing the taxpayer £9.5m ($15m) a year in upkeep, according to the Sunday Sun.

Last year 239 inmates were serving time in the region’s eight prisons, some of which are close to overcrowding, at a cost of £39,000 a year per prisoner.  And the figure could be much higher as the outlay for keeping some of the country’s most serious offenders segregated is believed to be far greater … There were 4767 prisoners serving their sentences in the North last year, 239 of which — just over 5% — were from other countries.  HMP Durham — which has a capacity for 953 criminals— housed the highest number of prisoners from other countries with 89 inmates for the year end of 2008, an increase of 33 on the previous year and the third rise in as many years …

Colin Moses, National chairman of the Prison Officers’ Association, who represents 33,500 staff in the most overcrowded prison system in Western Europe, believes prisoners should serve their sentences in their own country.   Mr Moses said: “Our view is that it’s not money well spent, especially at a time when the Prison Service is asking staff to take massive cuts … If we want to free prisons up we must think about deporting them.”

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Prison officers have voted to reject the British government’s controversial workforce modernisation plans by five to one, the BBC has learned.

The plans, which affect England and Wales, involve compulsory fitness tests and a new pay and grading structure.  Out of 25,000 ballot papers, over 20,000 Prison Officers Association members voted against, BBC home affairs correspondent Danny Shaw said. The voting figures will be independently verified on 20 February …

The Ministry of Justice wants to give low-ranking staff, to be known as “operations officers”, more responsibility as part of a £1bn efficiency drive.  All prison officers would have to pass an annual “bleep” test where they run between bollards at a certain speed.  But the union says it is concerned that safety would be put at risk and believes putting inexperienced staff in charge could lead to unrest.  It also argues that the fitness tests are unnecessary, given the demands of the job.

The pay offer is worth 10% in cash terms over three years, including a 4.75% consolidated increase over that period, the Ministry of Justice said.

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