Deputy prime minister expected to outline party’s new plans in speech on Monday, condemning the current system as ‘a litany of despair’.
The rising prison population in England and Wales is “not a sign of success, it’s a sign of failure”, deputy prime minister Nick Clegg will say on Monday, in a speech outlining his party’s justice policy.
The Liberal Democrat leader will say that he wants justice policy to be evidence-based and that, when a politician “bangs their fist on the lectern and announces that ‘prison works’”, they are ignoring the facts.
“We all want dangerous people off the street. We all want hardened criminals to pay for their actions. That means, for tens of thousands of criminals, prison is the answer”, Clegg is expected to say.
“But it is not the answer for every offender. There are more than 85,000 people in prison in England and Wales today. In 1994, there were fewer than 49,000. I don’t believe there are 36,000 more dangerous people now than then. We have not become a more vicious or sinister society.”
Clegg will say that vulnerable women, people with serious mental health issues, drug users and addicts are “all crammed like sardines into crowded prisons”.
“That is not proof that prison is ‘working’. It’s a litany of despair,” he will argue. “‘Prison works’ is a slogan, not a solution. It is not working when it routinely turns first time offenders into hardened criminals.”
Clegg is expected to lay out a set of Liberal Democrat justice policies aimed at lowering the prison population by reducing reoffending and diverting people with drug and mental health problems away from the criminal justice system.
These include expanding “liaison and diversion services”, which identify offenders who have mental health issues, learning disabilities or substance misuse vulnerabilities, increasing the use of “mental health treatment requirements” – which require an offender to undergo treatment during their sentence – and a wider use of GPS tagging.
Nearly half of prisoners have no formal qualifications, a quarter were taken into care as children and two thirds have tried class A drugs, Clegg will say.
His speech will give particular focus to female prisoners: “The number of women in prison has doubled since the mid-90s, leaving thousands of children separated from their mothers every year.
“Half of those women have suffered domestic abuse and one in three has suffered sexual abuse. Half suffer from anxiety or depression and a quarter have reported symptoms of psychosis. Nearly half of all women prisoners, and one in five men, have tried to kill themselves at some point in their lives.”
