Abstract
A short, casual conversation with Emeritus Professor Roy King in the corridors of the Cambridge Institute of Criminology, not quite a decade ago, turned out, for me, to have quite fateful consequences for my own thinking on penal matters. ‘I honestly thought’, he said wistfully (forgive me, Roy, if I don’t get your words exactly right), ‘that when I first started getting involved in prison reform, that we would be further along than we have actually got’. Me too. His response to his sense of a lost future has been to research, co-author and publish an impressive book built around lengthy interviews (sometimes more than one) with almost all senior and junior ministers and civil servants in the Home Office, Ministry of Justice, the Judiciary, the Inspectorates, heads of NOMS and HMPPS, the Parole Board and Independent Monitoring Boards, authors of relevant reports or policy reviews, and civil society organisations operating in the field. Not everyone approached agreed to be interviewed, and some junior ministers were inadvertently overlooked, but the task was huge, and the accomplishment is monumental.
Without minimising penal-political problems in the early post-WW2 years, King and Willmott focus on the 30-year period, from the 1990 Woolf Report onwards, ‘during which prisons and probation were reduced to a level of crisis never previously seen’ (p1, my italics), culminating with the immediate penal impacts of coronavirus disease 2019. They pitch their book to the informed general reader and at upcoming honest politicians whom they hope will devise the policies that lift prisons and probation from the ‘dire straits’ (p8) they are now in. They avoid unwieldly academic referencing but gain some insight from existing critiques of the enforced application of New Public Management in all spheres of British governance, and the wider history of blunders therein.
The aim of their interviews was to discover the ‘why’ of penal decision-making, in what ‘contexts’ (variously understood here as perceived political mandates, internal party politics, Treasury settlements and, later, austerity) and with what ‘rationales’, including, sometimes, their evidence-base or lack thereof. Charitably, give or take a few tactfully expressed reservations, King and Willmott claim ministers did what they did for the best, according to their lights. Still, judge for yourself what the characterisation of Chris Grayling – a man with ‘few regrets and no apologies’ (p136) as ‘self-confident’ (p128) might really mean. Overall, the authors tell a sombre tale, scrupulously. Much detail is new, some of the verbatim quotes are telling and intriguing differences of opinion between key players discussing the same event are frequently revealed. But for those of us who lived through the period in question, the downward trajectory is as dismal as it is familiar, unredeemed by learning that in some instances things could have turned out even worse than they actually did.
Our undeniably honest criminologists guide us at the end a cautiously hedged ‘agenda for action’, focussed on proposals for sentencing reform, problem-solving courts, judicial independence, the tone of the penal debate, prison numbers, release and recall procedures, probation's need for ties to local communities – much of it in the lost ‘spirit of Woolf’ – and echoing the agendas of existing justice and penal reform groups, which they may well re-invigorate. They remind us of the often impoverished, troubled lives of people who offend, and of what ‘turning [such] lives around’ (p234) entails in terms of organisation, resource and skill. And they do write, piercingly: Ministers should understand that hoping for rehabilitation by putting offenders in a situation expressly designed to de-habilitate them – as in prisons – is not a reasonable expectation (p234 emphasis added)
‘Expressly designed’ evokes an idea – the practical and symbolic functions served by imprisonment in vastly unequal societies – which person-centred, party-political, policy-oriented histories of this kind cannot properly explore, and which is somewhat at odds with a narrative emphasising blunders, rogue ambitions, missteps and false starts. There are intelligible sociological reasons why England and Wales has become less of a welfare state and more of a penal state, why ‘the culture of control’ has endured and why ‘the new punitiveness’ is now ‘the old punitiveness’, with added technology. King and Willmott never fully address the question of what range of political responses this calls for, and narrowly pin their hopes on the chimera of enough honest politicians emerging to develop and act on their reform agenda. ‘What politics have done’, they write, ‘honest politicians can undo’ (p233). Even as a sardonic credo for the present time this has limited leverage in the neoliberal dispensation under which our policymakers have been operating.
Over the decades covered here, there have demonstrably been many able and honourable women and men in the civil service, in prison and probation agencies, in the judiciary, in academia and even in ministerial roles, who have been doing their level best to make the system fair, rational and decent. A book like this can’t fully explain why, with so much goodwill, dedication and talent available in the system (even allowing for randomly disruptive ‘events’, the problems of ‘churn’ at the top and the manifest egotism of some careerist ministers), prisons have become the squalid, violent places they are and probation teeters on the brink of ruin, or why politics itself has become a terrain in which it is harder for virtuous people to rise and survive in.
For all my reservations, this is a valuable, vital book, a need-to-know history for all newcomers to the field, in or out of government. If I doubt that King and Willmott's specifically reformist ways out of the crisis are enough, it is only because that years-ago conversation with Roy led me to question whether my career's worth of reformist endeavours had amounted to as much as I’d hoped. It then served to revive my interest in the moral and practical imperatives of penal abolitionism, which offer – I honestly think – a more critical vantage point from which to judge the deepening horror and injustice of our present penal arrangements.