Labour's record on prisons

Now that we actually really definitely know the date of the election, as opposed to just knowing it, the usual look back at the government's record seems to be in order. So to kick off an occasional series, here's a couple of pretty damning stats mentioned in today's Guardian.

1. There are more people serving life sentences in England and Wales than in the rest of Europe combined, including Russia, Turkey and Ukraine. A total of 12,090 compared with 11,477, according to this, although there is no date.

Either we think people in England and Wales are much, much nastier than other people or we conclude that the justice system here - excepting Scotland, perhaps - is considerably more punitive than others. To what end though? It's not that the UK is murder capital of Europe, which might explain some of the difference - murder rates are higher in several western and eastern European countries, for example France, Finland, Portugal, Poland and the Czech Republic. The overall rate of crime victimisation is comparatively high, although not especially so, and this in any case can't explain the difference in the number of life sentences handed down.

2. In 2008, over 5,000 children (aged 15 to 17) entered prison, half for sentences of under six months (we are also imprisoning large numbers of sometimes much younger children, who have committed no crime whatsoever, in immigration detention centres). Not only is this almost certainly higher than anywhere else in Europe, the relatively short sentences suggest that many are not imprisoned for serious crimes. This in a sense is worse than the number of life sentences; these young people are not allowed to vote, drink or even drive a car, yet are held responsible enough for their crimes to be imprisoned for them, as opposed to finding some other way of dealing with their behaviour.

These facts probably do reflect a strain of popular punitiveness in English speaking countries which is stronger than in the non-Anglophone world. Higher imprisonment rates are what some people want. However we are not that much more punitive, by any stretch of the imagination. Furthermore, it is not the government's job to simply accede to such populism, and certainly not stoke it, as often seems to be the case, but to run a sensible and cost-effective criminal justice system which respects the rights of all involved (and does not, for example, simply lock up large numbers of people and throw away the key). There is very little evidence that the use of prison on this scale has much effect on crime rates, and considerable evidence to suggest that it brutalises many of those involved and scars the lives of both them and their families for much longer than the length of the sentence.