Titans Scrapped, But Large Prisons Still in Pipeline

An edited version of this article was published in last weeks edition of the Socialist.

The government’s flagship programme for increasing the prison population, 3 2,500 capacity Titan prisons have been scrapped and instead are to be replaced by 5 smaller 1,500 place prisons. These prisons will still be bigger than all but one of the currently existing prisons existing at the present in the UK. As government finances become tightened due to the impact of the recession, combined with the massive barrage of criticism they faced over the issue of ‘warehousing’ prisoners, the governments plan is to build 2 of the 5 immediately whilst leaving the other three prisons hanging in the area with the possibility of being scrapped.
More over, these new prisons will be privately built and run – proving that Straw and New Labour have learnt nothing from the disaster of PFI and privatisation of prisons and other public sector institutions over the past decade or so.
Yet a report in The Times (6 April) says that even before these new prisons are built twenty UK prisons already hold over 1,000 prisoners each. Colossal sums of money have been spent on prison building in the last few years.
This includes £430 million to create over 4,000 extra prison places and £2.3 billion to be spent by 2014 to create 20,000 new places including the five new 1,500 capacity jails as well as eight new prisons with a combined capacity of 5,400 alongside expansions of existing facilities.
However, the government constantly says that crime as a whole is falling and official figures back this up. So why does the prison population keep increasing, reaching a new record of 83,810 last August?
Certainly the nearly 5,000 prisoners serving (up to January 2009) indeterminate sentences for public protection have increased the figure. This is just one of many new sentences and criminal offences that the government has created over the last few years. Average sentence lengths have been creeping up over the last decade too.
But magistrates are pushing for even greater powers, doubling the length of prison sentence they can hand out up to 12 months. They claim they can deal with 18,000 more cases a year making huge savings for the Courts Service (the average cost of a crown court trial is £18,000 compared to £1,800 for a magistrates’ court trial).
The cases at present can be tried ‘either way’, by a magistrate or judge and jury – so this potentially could restrict such cases to magistrates courts only, removing the right to a jury trial. But should these unelected judges be given more powers?
As we have outlined in The Socialist before, only socialist measures using democratic methods to reduce the prison population and tackling the social issues at the root of crime as well as providing serious rehabilitation for prisoners can overcome the crisis.

Devolution and Justice - a report on a lecture

Yesterday evening I went to hear a public lecture by a Mr Justice Evans on Devolution and Justice at Bangor University. Yes, the man is a senior judge, and their were lots of high officials in the audience including the chief probation officer for wales, assistant police commissioner for north wales, lawyers, politicians and even the High Sheriff of Gwynedd (bet you didn't know we had one of them still!). And myself, sat there in a bright red Socialist Student tee-shirt - in amongst a load of people dressed in tuxedos and suits i felt a little underdressed, but I thought some of the issues raised were worth listening to.

The whole lecture was driven from the point of view of the potential for the assembley to create new laws in Wales, and the potential need for a Wales jurisdiction in response to this with Wales specific legal institutions (Scotland and Northern Ireland already do by the way). He described the moves to form a Wales only legal circuit (before, particularly in the North, had been lnked with Cheshire) and the benefits accrued (in terms of more jobs in Wales - but more importantly from my point of view access to legal services in the Welsh language - important in North Wales where many people are first language Welsh speakers).

He then further went on to talk about the need to expand this to create a welsh high court and court of appeal, as well as making legal services available in Wales. Again (and I can't help feeling this was pandering to Welsh local political interests) the potential job creation was stressed and the language factor also. He discussed this in a gradual way, of having the existing England and Wales court sitting in Cardiff several times a year so that Welsh cases can be heard in Wales, as it would take time for Wales to acquire the expertise to do this on it's own. In fact he liked in to Canadian provinces, and Swiss cantons having their own jurisdictions.

I've written about prisons in Wales before (see A New Prison For North Wales?), and for me this was the most interesting part of the lecture. In Wales there are five prisons (one private), none north of the M4 corridor, and there are no prisons for females. This creates enormous problems, particuarly for those in North Wales who may be held in remand in an English prison and travel up to 8 hours to court hearings. Also they are not permitted to speak Welsh in English prisons, and as I have mentioned given that it is many people's first language in this part of the world. This creates big social problems, it is also a burden on detainees families who struggle to be able to visit those in these situations.

What do socialists say about this. Obviously, we stand for equality and the right of self-determination for nations. That said we do not trust the capitalists (Welsh or not) and their representatives in the State system. Whilst a Welsh jurisdiction may see more localised justice, it will not deliver democraticly accessible justice, or see the eventual withering away of the state and the law that we would wish.
But what do you think?

Review - Justice in England (1938) by "A Barrister"

This book, originally written for Victor Gollanz's Left Book Club, gives an overview of the legal system in England at this time. The book describes the whole sawthe of this topic from how judges are appointed or trained, their role in courts, procedure of those courts and lots of other related issues. The great merit of the book is how it tries (usually succesfully) to explain this complex system to the lay person and the inherent class bias within it. Even though there have been several changes to the legal system in England since then, the general thrust of the analysis remains relevant today.
There are two large drawbacks to my mind with the book. Firstly is the authors insistance that simple proffessionalisation of the judiciary would result in a much fairer system, and following this his attack of juries as inherently unproffessional and thus bad justice. However, the author, as already noted, rallies against the class bias within the system which sees almost every single judge drawn from the upper or middle classes. His dismissal of juries contradicts this as this is where more working class people play a role within the legal system. Furthermore, greater professionalisation of the judiciary would probably result in a further class polaristaion, as the rich tend to have access to the best education and training, thus pushing the legal system further out of the orbit of ordinary working class people.
The second criticism to some extent flows from this, that is of the authors underlying belief that reforms are needed to better serve working people (such as greater professionalisation of judges), which comes out despite his contradictory arguement that change of the law has been resisted at every opportunity by the ruling class. History shows that workers have been forced every single concession from the ruling class or through the threat of struggle. Reformism however, pervades this book, you can see it quite clearly in the conclusion where the author talks about a 'socialist state' (an expression of Stalinist socialism in one country or Fabian reformism - see V.I. Lenin State and Revolution for a deeper understanding of the State). Unfortunately this book doesn't really provide a way foraward and that is it's biggest flaw.

Some demands they could have made (off the top of my head)

+ Regular democratic election of judges
+ Subject the judiciary to the right of recall and on no salary higher than the wage of a an average skilled worker
+ Extension of legal aid
+ Scrap the house of lords