The Howard League for Penal Reform

The Howard League have produced this new document questioning the logic of contemporary penal policy and the current prison building programme. The League starts from the assumption that everybody is agreed that it is useless to imprison petty offenders. They point out that the Prison Department is proposing to spend at least £100 million, over five years, on new buildings, in spite of the current staff shortage and recruitment problems. ‘We cannot accept’ says the document, ‘the logic of building more prisons, when the overcrowding is largely due to the imprisonment of people for whom provision could and should be made in the community, often at lower cost’. As a counter-argument the League puts forward the suggestion that ‘a major aim of penal policy should be to limit the prison population, during the next ten years, to those who present a serious danger to society’. They accept that a certain amount oi replacement of ‘Victorian slum fortresses’ is necessary, but warn against the danger that ‘by a penological Parkinson’s Law the number of prisoners will increase to fill the cells available for their detention’. They do not accept that prisons should be used as an expedient facility in the network of arrangements made for homeless men, and they express hope that the DHSS will soon provide the facilities to keep destitute alcoholics out of prison. Part of their counter-policy is to advocate ‘a substantial transfer of resources of finance and manpower from the custodial penal system to non-custodial measures’, to encourage sentencers ‘to make greater use of social and medical reports’, and to remove certain offences ‘such as those consequent upon homelessness and alcoholism’ from the criminal law or to make them non-imprisonable. One important suggestion they make which would affect almost every psychiatrist providing a district commitment is to extend outpatient facilities for medical reports ‘mandatorily if necessary’. In this vein they further suggest taking up a number of proposals made by the Standing Conference on London and South East Planning in its report Penal Establishments in the South East (1971) among which was a suggestion that prisons dealing with psychiatrically disturbed offenders should be accessible to good medical and consultant facilities.