Commenting on HM Chief Inspector of Prisons’ final annual report, Juliet Lyon, director of the Prison Reform Trust, described it as ‘a clear warning to be ignored at any government’s peril.’
She said:
Reading the Chief Inspector’s far-reaching summary of hard won prison reforms and the remaining blocks and challenges, you look over the precipice of slicing budget cuts and relentlessly rising prison numbers. Fragile gains could too easily fall victim to short-term thinking and cutbacks in the important things, sentence planning, family contact, training and resettlement, that reduce re-offending on release. The Chief Inspector uses the chilling phrase “regression to the mean”.
The Justice Committee’s report on justice re-investment, referred to by Anne Owers, offers the way to deploy limited public money most effectively – by reserving prison for violent and serious offenders and investing instead in effective community measures to cut crime.
Further information
A copy of the annual report can be found on the HM Inspectorate of Prisons website from 24 February 2010 at www.justice.gov.uk/inspectorates/hmi-prisons
