Reform UK’s new plan for prisons is full of holes and full of lies

The lies begin with the title. “Keeping criminals behind bars” is the strategy paper Farage presented in a press conference to cash in politically from the recent public outcry over the early release scheme.

Whether or not Reform UK would make all offenders spend their full sentences in prison wouldn’t change the fact that it would release all of them when their sentence is spent.

99.9% of prisoners– regardless of the crime committed and the length of the sentence- will be back on our streets eventually, under any government.

It’s something Reform UK likes us to forget because it would mean that what happens inside prisons matters and that rehabilitation is important.
You cannot pretend to care about crime rates whilst not caring about prison conditions and reducing reoffending: This is the fundamental contradiction of “lock-em’-up-and-throw-away-the-key” hard line policies. The worse the prisons, the higher the reoffending rates.

The strategy of the paper essentially rests on two pillars:

-         1. End early releases and reintroduce short sentences under 12 months, i.e. send more people to prison and keep them there for longer (exactly what governments have been doing since the 1990s and what has led us to the current crisis)

-         2. To do so, add prison places rapidly through “Nightingale Prisons” and empty UK prisons of over 10,000 foreign offenders (by deporting them to serve their sentence abroad)

Once you examine the feasibility of these proposals, you realise that they contain more holes than the walls of a prison built of Swiss cheese.

Sentences under 12 months:
It is universally agreed that short prison sentences do more harm than good.
They are costly compared to better alternatives and have worse outcomes.
They provide a revolving door for people to walk out and straight back into prison without being able to change their life situation. Even Rishi Sunak’s government –not soft on crime by any means – realised this.

Nightingale Prisons:
Yes, we do have prisons that have added capacity by building portacabins and prefab structures.
This can work, but only if you build them in addition to an existing prison infrastructure.

A prison consists of much more than just cells. Where is the kitchen going to be? The classrooms for group sessions and education? Library and gym? A variety of workshops so prisoners can work and learn trades?
A prison requires a very specific architecture and the idea that you could just put up tents or use existing abandoned buildings somewhere is just not realistic.

The example mentioned in the report of “Alligator Alcatraz” in Florida isn’t a good example, as this was a temporary detention centre, and not a prison. (It was also a complete failure, shut down after less than a year due to persistent human rights abuses and ballooning costs.)

Nightingale Hospitals and Nightingale Courts are equally not comparable – setting up a temporary field hospital is very different from a prison and for a Nightingale Court you essentially just need a large hall that you can find in many buildings that would not be suitable for prisons.

Let’s move on to the idea of deporting all 10,000 foreign prisoners immediately and have them serve their full sentence abroad (In places such as El Salvador or Kosovo).

We’ve all seen the horror images of the mega-prisons of El Salvador, giant human warehouses of 80,000 semi-naked, semi-human prisoners; where 80 people are packed into a cell sharing just two toilets, having to sleep with no mattress and 24-hour shrill lighting.

The cruelty here is the point. Reform UK always likes to divide the world into two categories: “Us” and “others”.
Foreigners– and foreign offenders in particular- are“others”.
Apparently, nobody has friends, neighbours, co-workers, partners, lovers, or gym buddies that are immigrants.

If foreign offenders are all evil monsters that have come on boats to rape our children, it might be fine to send them to El Salvador.
But once we realise that many of them will be our friends, family, partners and even children – perhaps convicted of less serious, non-violent offences - the idea suddenly seems less appealing. It’s what many Americans now realise as their families are torn apart by Trump’s policies.

What parties like Reform never mention when they tell us how wonderful it would be to leave the European Court of Human Rights: It’s not just others who would lose their basic human rights, but us, too.
Human rights are universal for that very reason – if you take them away for some, you take them away for everyone.

Leaving aside the xenophobia and cheap populism and just looking at the numbers, Reform’s proposals don’t add up either.

To send 10,000 prisoners abroad the infrastructure would have to be in place there – i.e. 10,000 empty prison spaces in working prisons, ready set up and just waiting to be filled. But actually, these spaces don’t exist anywhere; they’d have to be built from scratch.
Just like here in Britain, but with the added complication that foreign offenders come from over a hundred different countries, which each one of them an agreement would be necessary to go ahead with the plan, meaning protracted negotiations.

Apart from the El Salvador example, an agreement between Denmark and Kosovo is mentioned as a working model. The report states, “Kosovo rents prison places to Denmark for approximately €70,000 per annum”.
This is another lie.
In 2022, Denmark signed an agreement to lease 300 prison places to Kosova at a cost of €15 million per year.
So far, not a single prisoner has been sent there, with first transfers expected earliest in 2027.
Which means this tiny agreement over 300 prisoners was signed almost five years ago and not a single prisoner has been sent so far, yet Reform UK claims that sending 10,000 prisoners abroad in the same time span shouldn’t be a problem.

The reality is that sending foreign prisoner to prisons abroad would be complicated and very costly. It would also take a very long time to implement- longer than simply building the prison places here.
This is why Justice Minister Alex Chalk abandoned the idea when it was proposed in 2023.

Apart from all this, Reform UK seemed to have overlooked the glaringly obvious problem that around a third of all foreign offenders are on remand, meaning they haven’t been convicted or sentenced yet. You cannot deport someone for having committed a crime if you haven’t convicted them of that crime.

People are arrested and remanded on a rolling basis, meaning you need many prison places just to facilitate that. Then come the logistics of deportations and allocation of places abroad; even without legal challenges (another impossibility) this would take time.

This means that even just accounting for the logistics of holding foreign prisoners on remand for their court hearings and then processing them for deportation, we require around 4,000 prison spaces, reducing the number of prisoners Reform UK could theoretically send abroad to around 6,000.

The root of the problem

Reform UK is right in saying that the prison system is broken to the point of collapse and needs radical change rather than tinkering around the edges.
The problem is that what it presents as solutions are the very causes of the problem. It’s the disease presented as a cure.

The prison system is broken because of sentence inflation – successive governments since the 1990s have been “tough on crime” and sent more people to prison for longer, despite crime rates going down.
Too many people are in prison that simply shouldn’t be there, and many are there for much too long (The IPP scandal is a good example).

At the same time, alternatives that would achieve better outcomes have not been considered, scaled down, or starved of funding.
Youth centres, mental health and addiction services and other services in the community that would prevent people from ending up in prison in the first place have all been closed down.
Austerity has gutted the prison service of resources and staff, leading to prisons that are dilapidated, overcrowded, drug-ridden and dangerous.

Any sensible and responsible government would not aim to increase the prison population, but to reduce it.
New prisons should not be used to house more prisoners, but to replace Victorian prison buildings such as Pentonville that should have been closed decades ago.

Reform UK’s proposals will not work because they are not meant to.
They exist for the sole purpose of winning votes.

The fundamental political problem of prison and criminal justice is that it is very easy to win votes by telling lies; and almost impossible to win them by explaining complex, counterintuitive truths.

It seems intuitive than sending more people to prison for longer will make our streets safer, for example, even when the opposite is the case.

Any government’s success in reforming criminal justice and our prisons will depend on having the courage and political will to explain complex and counterintuitive realities to the public.

This will be a risky challenge and not be easy. But it will be worth it, as the upside will be that a better informed public that will not fall for the shameless lies and manipulative populism that Reform UK presents as if they were workable policy proposals.