Top Judge Attacks ‘Trapdoor ‘To Prison’

Britain’s most senior judge yesterday called for an end to the automatic recall to prison of released offenders who technically breach their licences. He warned that it had become a “trapdoor to prison” and was a main factor in swelling the record jail population.

Lord Phillips, the lord chief justice, said that concern about the impact of automatic recalls was so widespread within the criminal justice system, and even within the government, that with luck it would be dropped by the new justice ministry, which starts work next week when the Home Office is split.

About 800 offenders a month are being sent back to prison for breaching the terms of their licences, matching the monthly growth of the prison population in England and Wales, which has once again topped 80,000.

Lord Phillips said recent research had shown that up to 48% of prisoners in some local jails were there for technical breaches of their licence, such as not showing up for a probation appointment.

“I have concerns about a system that requires the automatic return to custody where conditions of a community sentence or licence are breached,” Lord Phillips told the Probation Service centenary conference in London yesterday.

“Such a requirement detracts from the autonomy of the probation officer, who is best placed to distinguish between the offender who has no motivation to undertake his community sentence, and therefore may have to face time in prison, and the offender who has a disorganised lifestyle, but with whom it is worth persevering.”

The lord chief justice said that assuming all offenders committed breaches because of their “villainy rather than their disorganised circumstances” not only frustrated probation staff who painstakingly tried to build up relationships with them, but also filled up the prisons.

He said the government had miscalculated in toughening the sentencing framework and warned that home secretary John Reid’s plan to build his way out of the crisis would not work. “The prisons are full and the predictions are that the rate of prison sentencing is bound to outstrip the capacity of the prisons, despite the plan to provide another 8,000 prison places.”

He said it was not open to him to solve the problem simply by instructing magistrates and judges to “go easy” as that would be interfering in judicial independence.

Lord Phillips’s intervention comes after prison governors complained last month that the jails were being filled with released offenders automatically being whisked into custody for “trivial” reasons.

His sentiments were echoed by the former home secretary Lord Hurd, who told the conference that the government’s plan to build 8,000 extra prison places in the next two to three years simply postponed the moment of breakdown.

“On April 27 the prison population, including those wastefully held in police cells, totalled 80,368,” he said. “This is just 328 below what is called the operational usable capacity, ie the number of prisoners you can cram into the prisons regardless of the evils of overcrowding. Twelve months ago the figure was 3,422 fewer.”