Britain already has one of the most lenient prison policies in Europe
Civitas, 22 July 2010
We are sending far too many offenders to prison: at least, that is the new meme round Westminster. Ken Clarke, in a speech last month, complained that ‘Just banging up more and more people [for longer] without actively seeking to change them is what you would expect of Victorian England.’ Today Crispin Blunt, Clarke’s parliamentary undersecretary, is set to denounce support for prison as ‘populist rhetoric’. With all these accusations about current policy flying around, it may surprise some that we have one of the least punitive systems in Europe.
A recent report from the UN affiliated European Institute for Crime Prevention and Control analysed criminal justice systems around the world. They developed a measure, the ‘punitivity ratio’ (see p. 143), which measures the number of prisoners compared to the number of offenders successfully prosecuted. They found in the UK that for every 100 convicts, there are only 4 prisoners. By contrast, Germany has 11 prisoners for every 100 convicts, while Italy has 19.
Even Denmark and Sweden, often praised for their liberal and social democratic credentials, imprison more people for each conviction than the UK. The European average is 20 prisoners for every 100 offences, five times more punitive than the UK. Even Canada, which Ken Clarke praises for supposedly using fewer prison sentences, has twice the punitivity ratio of Britain. Finland is the only substantial exception with a significantly lower punitivity ratio, which certainly makes it worthy of study but not of immediate imitation. The result is that your average offender in the UK has a much better chance of avoiding prison than in almost any other country in Europe.
We are not ‘banging up’ ever more offenders. We are barely keeping up with the rest of Europe in protecting the public, when we consider the overall number of offenders that we have. Reducing the prison population in this context would not be a way of dragging Britain out of the Victorian era and into the 21st Century. It would be a bold (some might say suicidal) experiment in what happens to a society when you fail to incapacitate large numbers of repeat offenders and serious criminals.
It is deeply misleading to use the ‘punitivity ratio’ as a measure of the punitivity of the criminal justice system as a whole. The ratio can, and should, only be seen as what it is: the number of prisoners compared to the number of offenders successfully prosecuted. To conclude from the UK’s punitivity ratio that “The result is that your average offender in the UK has a much better chance of avoiding prison than in almost any other country in Europe” is ludicrous. This statement ignores the many factors that impact on whether someone receives a conviction in the first place – the extent of crime, the effectiveness of policing, the likelihood of different crimes being reported by the public and so on.
Although not wholly unproblematic (due to definition and measurement issues, which equally apply to the punitivity ratio) the prison rate per 100,000 of the population is a preferable measure for comparison, as Ken Clarke appears to recognise.
There is no getting round it – we are ‘banging up’ ever more offenders. Whether this can be linked to the fall in crime since the mid-1990s shown by the British Crime Survey is another question. Estimates suggest that just 0.3% of all crimes reported by the public in the British Crime Survey result in a prison sentence, suggesting that the criminal justice system has far less impact on crime overall than might intuitively be expected.
[Nick Cowen responds: It is true that a relatively small proportion of crime leads to a prison sentence. But then the question is how many of those unsolved crimes are committed by offenders who have been convicted for that 0.3% of crime. The most recent survey by the Home Office suggested that the average prisoner had committed around 140 offences in the year before they were incarcerated. That could account for a hefty chunk of unsolved crime, that can be prevented through imprisonment.]
Looking at how many convictions result in prison is a highly misleading way of determining how punitive a criminal justice system is.
This is because other countries, who imprison less people per 100,000 population, very likely have far more diversion from prosecution than we do here. In other words, the reason why more of their convictions result in prison sentences is that they tend to not bother to criminalise people over comparatively petty offences.
If your argument is that we should follow the example of whatever the majority of other countries do, we ought to raise the age of criminal responsibility and imprison less people per 100,000 population than we do now.
[Nick Cowen responds: the advantage of the punitivity ratio is that it, to some extent, factors in the number of offenders in a society relative to the number who are imprisoned. If sentences are, in any sense, meant to reflect the seriousness and frequency of offences, as well as their ability to prevent further criminal behaviour, then you would expect the overall incarceration rates to be higher in higher crime societies. We have relatively high crime rates, therefore we have relatively high overall incarceration rates. That does not mean that we are an especially punitive society as the UN study indicates.
I don’t believe we should necessarily imitate other societies. I think we should try to understand why other societies have lower overall crime rates. Using prison sentences when appropriate appears to be at least a small part of that story]