Jacob Dunne: Britain’s prison crisis has become a crisis of principle

By Jacob Dunne, Co-Founder, Common Ground Justice

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I have followed the row over whether two of PC Andrew Harper’s killers should be released early with particular unease. I share something uncomfortable with them: I too was convicted of manslaughter.

In 2011, aged 19, I killed James Hodgkinson, a 28-year-old trainee paramedic, with a single, unprovoked punch on a night out in Nottingham. I pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 30 months in prison. James’s parents, David and Joan, believed that sentence was far too short.

Today, Britain is debating whether two other men convicted of manslaughter should be released early because our prisons are full. The Harper family’s anger is entirely understandable. So too, for that matter, is the Government’s dilemma. My concern lies elsewhere. We have reached a point where decisions of enormous consequence are being driven by crisis rather than a coherent, principled, long-term strategy for justice.

There are more than a thousand people currently serving sentences for manslaughter. That single offence covers profoundly different circumstances, intentions and levels of culpability. Yet, because the prison estate has reached breaking point, ministers have found themselves drawing lines between offenders according to broad offence categories.

But there is another set of questions receiving surprisingly little attention. What do we know about the people behind those categories? Have they accepted responsibility? What have they done with their time in prison? What evidence is there that they present less risk than when they entered it?

I don’t know the answers in the Harper case. Nor, it seems, does most of the public debate. But those are precisely the questions James’s parents wanted answered about me.

David and Joan believed I deserved a longer sentence. They also wanted to know what I was doing with it. Was I confronting the causes of my offending behaviour? Was I remorseful? Was I taking responsibility? Was I doing anything that might reduce the chances of something similar happening again?

Those are questions our criminal justice system is surprisingly poor at answering, despite evidence that these questions matter greatly to both victims and the public. Too often justice is administered for victims and to perpetrators.

The process of Restorative Justice eventually gave David and Joan the opportunity to ask me those questions directly, without having to scream from the sidelines. Looking into their eyes made it impossible for me to continue seeing myself simply as a victim of unfortunate circumstance. It forced me to take responsibility, gave me a deeper understanding of the impact of my actions and strengthened my determination to contribute something back to society. With David and Joan’s support I went back into education, got a degree and became a trainer and mentor for young people at risk of offending.

Over three decades, governments of different colours have competed to appear tougher on crime with little forward planning to deliver those promises. Eventually the arithmetic catches up with the rhetoric.

At the Common Ground Justice Project, which I co-founded, we have spent the past two years listening across political divides to uncover the values people share and the principles that provide a more durable foundation for reform. People want serious wrongdoing to carry serious repercussions. But they also want responsibility: evidence that someone has confronted the harm they caused, demonstrated change and become less likely to cause future harm. They support rehabilitation – but only when they feel reassured that consequences are happening.

Kemi Badenoch recently made an interesting contribution to this debate when defending her party’s decision to appoint reformed former neo-Nazi Joshua Bonehill-Paine to a national advisory role. Her argument was that rehabilitation must mean recognising the possibility of genuine change, and that principles mean little if we apply them only when politically convenient. “A principle which applies only to your opponents is not a principle, just an excuse,” she wrote.

Her challenge is particularly relevant to our criminal justice system. A durable principle cannot disappear whenever an individual case becomes emotionally or politically difficult. But consistency of principle does not require identical outcomes. It requires a framework robust enough to make difficult individual judgements fairly.

Consider Restorative Justice. The Victims’ Code promises rights “for every victim, no matter the crime”, yet current guidance creates a presumption that Restorative Justice is “unsuitable” for victims of certain offence categories rather than beginning with individual assessment. Had that approach applied to my case, we would have been denied the process that transformed all three of our lives.

Instead, trained practitioners carefully assessed and prepared us. David and Joan and I began communicating through mediation and letters. I returned to educationand demonstrated change over time before we eventually met face to face. We now campaign together to raise awareness of restorative justice and promote victims’ rights.

Which offenders are eligible for early release and which victims are eligible for restorative justice are very different decisions, but both illustrate the danger of allowing broad categories to substitute for principled case-by-case judgement. Shared principles should determine the questions we ask; the evidence in individual cases should determine the answers.

That distinction matters particularly in prison. Our research found that only 29 per cent of the public believe prison makes someone less likely to offend again, while support for imprisonment as a consequence for serious crime remains strong. The public can distinguish between the basic purpose of prison for public protection and still hold doubts about what it achieves.

Almost everybody we imprison eventually returns to society. If prison does not help people become less dangerous, it protects the public only for as long as the prison gates remain closed. The public are entitled to expect more from a prison sentence than the passage of time: serious repercussions, certainly, but also responsibility, reduced risk and, where possible, genuine change.

Britain undoubtedly needs sufficient prison capacity to deliver the sentences its courts impose. The threat of running out of prison cells has become a crisis of principle. We say sentences should mean something, but lack the capacity to deliver them. We say public safety is paramount, while overcrowding increasingly constrains the choices available. We say we believe in rehabilitation, while too often failing to create the conditions in which change can happen.

What good are principles if they cannot be applied?

Two in three voters say they want major change in criminal justice. At Common Ground, we are listening across political divides to uncover where that common ground lies and translate it into a long-term strategy for reform.

The answer will not be another quick fix for overcrowding, nor another policy written in response to the case dominating tomorrow’s headlines. Britain needs sufficient capacity to uphold the principles it chooses, and principles robust enough to guide difficult decisions when emotions run highest

The prison crisis has shown us what happens when we have neither.