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Can we build our way out of the prison crisis?

In December 2007, Lord Carter published his review on prisons – ‘Securing the Future: Proposals for the Efficient and Sustainable Use of Custody in England and Wales’ (Carter, 2007). The review is a response to the 60 per cent increase in the prison population that has occurred since 1995 despite an overall reduction in recorded crime over the same period – a reduction which is also mirrored across many western nations. The document can be seen as a realistic acknowledgment of the need to plan and provide more prison spaces in an ageing estate. Current forecasts suggest that planned increases in capacity are unlikely to meet the growing demand for prison places in the short, medium or indeed long-term. As such, this building programme could be yet another failed attempt to address those far too frequent occurrences when the UK prison system becomes perilously close to overcapacity. While the report suggests increases to the prison estate, it fails to provide an unequivocal commitment to the increased use of community sanctions, which would encourage policy makers to develop a transparent strategy to reduce not only the projected but also the present adult prison population. The underlying social, economic and political factors which have led to record levels of imprisonment are largely ignored in the review and crucially the report fails to address the fundamental question: ‘Why in the United Kingdom do we incarcerate more of our citizens than just about all of our European counterparts?’ The review offers an essentially managerialist solution to the overuse of custodial measures in the United Kingdom. It envisages that much of the capital costs of building new prisons can be achieved through efficiency savings and more effective commissioning through contestability (competitive tendering). The ‘headline grabbing’ recommendation of the review has been the proposal to build three ‘Titan’ prisons holding up to 2500 prisoners. It is intended that these new additions to the estate will mainly hold adult prisoners, though females and young offenders could be held within designated segments of the establishment. The review could therefore be criticized for prioritizing economies of scale over the operational difficulties inherent in managing such large institutions and the need to properly meet the needs of specific groups of prisoners such as women and young people. The introduction of contestability was central to the earlier report by Lord Carter (Carter, 2003) which led to the creation of NOMS (The National Offender Management Service). Ominously, leaked reports of the Organisational Review of the