WE HAVE had enough of experts, we were previously told. Our new Prime Minister clearly disagrees. One of Sir Keir Starmer’s most imaginative ministerial appointments has been to put James Timpson in charge of prisons, probation, and parole. Mr Timpson, who is not an MP, is an expert indeed.
For more than 20 years, Mr Timpson has been visiting prisons and recruiting ex-offenders to work in his company: repairing shoes, watches, phones, and cutting keys. Some 1500 prison-leavers make up ten per cent of his workforce. Only four of them have reoffended and gone back to prison.
Prison ministers, if truth be told, are usually unhappy individuals, who find that there is only one chair left when the music stops at the end of a government reshuffle. Mr Timpson, by contrast, actually wanted to tackle our perennial crisis in the prisons system, which is at 98.5-per-cent capacity, with 87,505 people behind bars. Inmates are already doubling up in cells built for one.
Until recently, Mr Timpson chaired the Prison Reform Trust. It financed an independent commission on sentencing policy, chaired by a former Bishop to Prisons, the Rt Revd James Jones (Comment, 30 September 2022). I was one of the commissioners. What we found, after a two-year inquiry, is that prison sentences in this country have been growing longer and longer — without achieving the aim which politicians desired.
The number of people imprisoned for ten years or more has doubled in a decade. Yet, despite a massively increased cost to the taxpayer — £48,409 a year per prisoner, about the same as sending them to Eton — the rate of reoffending is rising, not falling. This is because most prisons are just seen as warehouses for the wicked, in which scant regard is paid to the rehabilitation of offenders.
The longer that men and women are incarcerated in such places, the less likely is the prospect of reform. Our national addiction to sentencing and punishment builds in a self-fulfilling prophecy of recidivism. It is the educational and training content of a sentence, not its length, which is the best barometer of the reduction in reoffending that will make our streets safer.
What is needed to solve the prison crisis is a paradigm shift — something that Mr Timpson understands. In an interview on Channel 4 in February, he suggested that only one third of our prisoners are so dangerous that they should be behind bars. Another third should be sentenced to community service, which would prevent their punishment from jeopardising their job, home, or marriage, as prison does. And the final third — many of them women — should be receiving some kind of support for mental-health problems outside prison, instead of being trapped in the offending cycle.
Effecting change will not be easy. Rory Stewart’s recent memoir, Politics on the Edge (Books, 24 November 2023), suggests that his work as a prisons minister was undermined constantly by inflexible bureaucrats, previous political decisions, austerity, and staff shortages. But Mr Timpson has shown, demonstrating a spirit of ethical capitalism in his own company, that change is possible — and that, if people are given a second chance, most of them take it.
“The best way to solve a problem is to ask the people who actually do the job,” he has said. It’s an approach that is certainly worth a try.