How Labour’s jail strategy could come unstuck

Let’s talk cobblers. The Prime Minister has responded to the jail space crisis by ennobling the nation’s shoe mender-in-chief James Timpson and making him minister for prisons, probation and parole. This is a bold move but not one without risk.

Timpson has made his fortune out of the ubiquitous key cutting and watch repair outlets that sprout from many big supermarkets. He’s less well known for a passionate interest in penal affairs. He became the first household name retailer to employ carefully screened prison leavers in his shops and they have returned his trust by becoming some of his best workers. I’ve never had a bad visit to a Timpsons; this says much about the business his father and he have built on can-do socially aware capitalism.

But fixing prisons, while rebuilding public confidence in a shattered prisons and probation agency, is going to require a different approach and a lot of hard-nosed realpolitik. His appointment has been universally acclaimed by the criminal justice commentariat to the point of fawning sycophancy. These people will expect him to make good on the pre-appointment poetry that suggested two thirds of people currently incarcerated should not be there. He told Channel 4 in February:

‘We have 85,000 people in prison, it’s going to go up to 100,000 pretty soon. A third of them should definitely be there. There’s another third, in the middle, which probably shouldn’t be there but they need some other kind of state support. A lot of them have lots of mental health issues. They’ve been in and out of prison all their lives. And there’s another third, and there’s a large proportion of women, where prison is a disaster for them. Because it just puts them back in the offending cycle.’

Starmer is expected to introduce emergency measures in the coming days to automatically release criminals less than halfway through their sentence. While this might go some way to alleviating the crisis in prisons, throwing open the gates of our feral, dysfunctional prisons could horrify and alienate huge numbers of voters who did not elect his boss to make their communities less safe. An overwhelmed probation service crushed by ideological vandalism and obsessive reorganisation can’t take on any more risk burden without it sinking entirely. The room for manoeuvre is minuscule. The threats are mighty.

Yet for all this, we should be grateful that the prisons minister is someone who actually wants the brief, rather than some indifferent and patrician non-entity who happened to be the last man standing in ministerial musical chairs when the tune stopped. This will be a refreshing change, although quite why Starmer couldn’t find a minister from his new intake of MPs – including a former prison officer – suggests a certain stylistic approach. We will have to wait to see if and when the substance emerges.

Timpson would do well to apply his vaunted business acumen to the gruesome job he has volunteered for. Imagine you’re the chair of the board of a commercial company with a turnover of £8 billion a year. You make widgets. The failure rate of those widgets is 55 per cent after 12 months. You’d sack the board, wouldn’t you? This company is going bust unless something radical is done. Well, you can’t. You’re the taxpaying compulsory shareholders in a state-run national enterprise that sees over half of all adult male offenders convicted again after a year. So no-one is saying our present fetish for being more punitive for longer is working. More crime, more wasted potential. More victims.

Timpson and his boss the justice secretary Shabana Mahmood have no choice anyway. The result of locking up far too many people with not enough space drowns out all other considerations. We have to empty our prisons. There will be even more people, some of them pretty dangerous and risky, who will be let out well before the time a judge originally said they must leave prison. That is the situation Starmer faces after a quarter-of-a-century of failure to deliver new prisons to cope with rising rates of incarceration. 

There’s an immediate paradox here. It would only take one high-profile crime committed by a prisoner on early release to plunge the strategy into crisis. So risk averse probation staff will send people back in for the slightest infraction. 

Many of the people who are cheering Timpson on are convinced ‘decarcerators’ who will be delighted by his previous assertion that we are addicted to punishment. This is misplaced. Retribution should not be a dirty word. But nor should we send offenders who need prison into places where you would hesitate to house livestock awash with violence, indolence and despair.

We should also not forget the people in uniform who look after them in far fewer numbers than we need at huge personal cost. The implication of some of Timpson’s earlier thoughts on crime and punishment are at odds with public sentiment, even as they soothe the brows of the criminal justice boss class. Prison does work; short sentences can work; see Europe for multiple examples. It’s just the way we do jailing – in stuffed giant warehouses awash with drugs and brutality where education and training blocks lie idle – is stacked against the possibility of redemption.

With these caveats, I wish James Timpson well in getting to grips with the omnicrisis he has taken on. One area where he can make a huge difference in is getting prisoners job ready through the gate and into employment beyond. He’s certainly qualified for this as a trailblazer. I’ve worked with a small NGO called Tempus Novo for some years now. It’s run by two former prison officers and has spectacular success in getting – and keeping – prison leavers into employment. It’s about the only thing we know for sure that reduces reoffending. But we have to create the space and time and have a well-led workforce that dramatically improves the chances of this happening.

Reducing the prison population is the priority. The tough truths have to come first, as the Prime Minister has said. But after that, we also need a minister who remembers that not all of our profoundly dysfunctional prisons are overcrowded. Timpson will need to ask tough questions of the mandarins and offer some hope for the battered front line jailers who, unlike the HQ bureaucrats who will soon surround him, literally hold the keys to hope.