Does Rehab Work For Everyone?

It does seem, I was reading an article a little bit earlier on, the Prison Officers Association, Mark Fairhurst, saying that he doesn't understand why nobody is talking about reform, sorry, remand prisoners.

We've got something like 17,000 people at the moment who have not yet been to court, who have not been found guilty of anything yet, but they're locked up taking up 17,000 prison spaces.

I don't understand.

I mean, I'm a fairly logical person.

I don't understand the issue with saying, well, we're going to let people out who are definitely guilty, but we're going to keep those people that we don't know if they're guilty or not locked up.

Am I missing something here?

I mean, there's a whole issue about the early release scheme and, you know, I mean, nobody currently serves the full sentence.

If you're given five years by a court, for example, you never serve five years, never have.

And, you know, there are good arguments why you might want to release people midway through the sentence.

You can supervise them in the community, helping their resettlement.

You know, I do have some concerns about how much of a gap now has opened up between the declared sentence in the court and what sentence is individualised.

because i think then that's something that the public just don't understand and understandably they don't understand it doesn't seem to make much sense so there's a there's a whole argument there that's the we our sentences are far too long and so what we need to do is try to reduce sentence length rather than try and resolve that problem administratively behind the scenes as it were by ministers and others kind of agreeing to these early risk schemes which can be You know, widely kind of challenged and questioned.

The point that Mark Fairhurst makes about remand prisoners is absolutely spot on.

You know, we have a huge backlog in the courts at the moment and lots of people languishing in prison waiting for a trial.

And when we remember that a lot of those currently sitting in prison waiting for trial, when they finally get to trial will either be acquitted and then it will all have been for nothing and they'll have lost how many years of their life languishing in prison or even if they get a prison sentence the time they've served on remand will be discounted and so in practice the number that may be released anyway so it is a kind of it's a ridiculous situation we do need to resolve this because they just take a huge amount of places and there's quite a lot of injustice there and the other big one is recalls and individuals who are recalled to prison Having been released, often for some technical reasons, they're sent back to prison.

Back in 1993 or thereabouts, there were around 100 people in prison at any one point under recall.

It's now about 12,000.

So it's gone very badly wrong.

with a recall system then you can start thinking about so-called IPP prisoners these are individuals who are serving life sentence-like sentences often for relatively petty offences the sentence was abolished in 2012 but there's still around two and a half thousand prisoners languishing trying to get out at the moment often having spent many many more years than the court judged and actually you know the one that a lot of people forget female prisoners you know you can you At least tomorrow, the vast number of female prisoners and they would pose no risk to the public whatsoever.

And so and there's about three to four thousand of those.

So there's lots of things that could be done.

I read in one of the papers earlier that.

Nigel Farage has said that Andy Burnham lacks the imagination to solve these problems.

Now, that may or may not be true.

I don't think that Nigel Farage has any greater imagination if he's just kind of banging on about foreign prisoners and trying to send them to Salvador, when there are so many more simple, practical things which could be implemented a lot more quickly than years and years negotiation to get foreign prisoners out of the country.

It does seem, I was reading an article a little bit earlier on, the Prison Officers Association, Mark Fairhurst, saying that he doesn't understand why nobody is talking about reform, sorry, remand prisoners.

We've got something like 17,000 people at the moment who have not yet been to court, who have not been found guilty of anything yet, but they're locked up taking up 17,000 prison spaces.

I don't understand.

I mean, I'm a fairly logical person.

I don't understand the issue with saying, well, we're going to let people out who are definitely guilty, but we're going to keep those people that we don't know if they're guilty or not locked up.

Am I missing something here?

I mean, there's a whole issue about the early release scheme and, you know, I mean, nobody currently serves the full sentence.

If you're given five years by a court, for example, you never serve five years, never have.

And, you know, there are good arguments why you might want to release people midway through the sentence.

You can supervise them in the community, helping their resettlement.

You know, I do have some concerns about how much of a gap now has opened up between the declared sentence in the court and what sentence is individualised.

because i think then that's something that the public just don't understand and understandably they don't understand it doesn't seem to make much sense so there's a there's a whole argument there that's the we our sentences are far too long and so what we need to do is try to reduce sentence length rather than try and resolve that problem administratively behind the scenes as it were by ministers and others kind of agreeing to these early risk schemes which can be You know, widely kind of challenged and questioned.

The point that Mark Fairhurst makes about remand prisoners is absolutely spot on.

You know, we have a huge backlog in the courts at the moment and lots of people languishing in prison waiting for a trial.

And when we remember that a lot of those currently sitting in prison waiting for trial, when they finally get to trial will either be acquitted and then it will all have been for nothing and they'll have lost how many years of their life languishing in prison or even if they get a prison sentence the time they've served on remand will be discounted and so in practice the number that may be released anyway so it is a kind of it's a ridiculous situation we do need to resolve this because they just take a huge amount of places and there's quite a lot of injustice there and the other big one is recalls and individuals who are recalled to prison Having been released, often for some technical reasons, they're sent back to prison.

Back in 1993 or thereabouts, there were around 100 people in prison at any one point under recall.

It's now about 12,000.

So it's gone very badly wrong.

with a recall system then you can start thinking about so-called IPP prisoners these are individuals who are serving life sentence-like sentences often for relatively petty offences the sentence was abolished in 2012 but there's still around two and a half thousand prisoners languishing trying to get out at the moment often having spent many many more years than the court judged and actually you know the one that a lot of people forget female prisoners you know you can you At least tomorrow, the vast number of female prisoners and they would pose no risk to the public whatsoever.

And so and there's about three to four thousand of those.

So there's lots of things that could be done.

I read in one of the papers earlier that.

Nigel Farage has said that Andy Burnham lacks the imagination to solve these problems.

Now, that may or may not be true.

I don't think that Nigel Farage has any greater imagination if he's just kind of banging on about foreign prisoners and trying to send them to Salvador, when there are so many more simple, practical things which could be implemented a lot more quickly than years and years negotiation to get foreign prisoners out of the country.