Give prison budgets to local authorities, says leading thinktank

Budgets for prison places should be devolved from central government to local authorities, a leading thinktank has argued.

In its report on child imprisonment, called Punishing Costs, the New Economic Foundation argued that the move – if combined with more power over how councils can arrange youth justice services locally – “would remove the perverse incentive to put young people in prison”.

The Foundation recommended that local authorities should be allowed to keep some of the savings created from reducing custody, with a view toreinvesting these funds into the reduction of crime.

The thinktank argued that local authorities would be able to reduce the use of imprisonment by 13% through policies such as better co-operation between local agencies and courts and increased use of restorative justice that allows offenders to repair the damage they have caused in the community.

This approach – which would not require controversial legislative change or a large increase in public spending – could result in savings of up to £60m in England and £2m in some local areas.

The report’s key findings included:

• England and Wales imprison proportionally more under-aged children than almost all other Western European countries
• Serving a prison sentence makes it more likely for children to continue offending after they have been released
• Time spent in prison makes it more likely for children to be unemployed in the future, have lower income, be disconnected from education and have unstable living costs, and
• Holding a child in prison costs about £100,000 a year, while the indirect costs of imprisonment for the state is around £40,000.

Report author Aleksi Knuutila said: “What really makes our obsessive use of prisons even more of a tragedy is that those resources could have been used to tackle crime much more effectively. The resources we now waste on locking children up could be spent on measures that would really keep our streets safer.

“All the research shows that prison is failing to rehabilitate offenders and isn’t steering them away from crime. At a time when public services area being cut everywhere, we need to ask whether our spending is really delivering on safety in our neighbourhoods.”

Juliet Lyon, director of the Prison Reform Trust, suggested that a policy of budget devolvement would encourage local authorities to deal with minor offending locally, instead of relying on a central prison system.

She said: “Community measures have been shown to reduce offending much more effectively than any length of prison sentence. We urgently need to change the pattern of public investment.”