This week, we have a guest blog post from Kiran Sharma, who has been with us this week for a work experience placement.
........................................................................................................................................................................................................................
Earlier this week, The Guardian published an article entitled reporting the details of the gross overcrowding in English and Welsh jails. These figures were released on Tuesday by the Prison Reform Trust, who argue that short spells of incarceration of offenders are less effective at reducing crime than community-based penalties.
The prison population has been steadily rising since 2002, where it stood at 70,860 incarcerated individuals. In 2007 it rose to 80,762 and on the 17th August of this year at the figure had reached 86,801.
Alongside increasing prison populations, figures released suggest that 47% of adults reoffend within a year of leaving prison, with almost 57% doing the same if their sentence was under 12 months. These figures show that increased arrests and sentencing are doing very little to stop subsequent crimes from being committed.
This problem is not only limited to the adults; The Guardian’s figures suggest that nearly 70% of children (10-17 years of age) who are released from custody reoffend within a year.
Juliet Lyon, the director of the Prison Reform Trust, claims 'The prison population can be safely reduced by curbing inflation in sentencing, calling a halt to any unnecessary use of custodial remand'.
Spirit Level Film previously interviewed Juliet Lyon for our 2010 film, The Fear Factory, in which she explained the problems with having a large number of youth offenders: 'If we don't reduce the number of children and young people who go to prison, we will ensure that we have the largest adult prison population any country could ever imagine having because we're growing our adult prisoners'.
The film explores the way that politicians and the media have been misleading the public about the scale of crime in order to gain votes or to maintain popularity. For example, David Howarth, the former Liberal Democrat Spokesperson for Justice, explains in the film that: 'reporting a single crime is far more striking, sells more newspapers, gets more viewers than reporting dry figures about falling crime rates', with youth violence in particular being one of the most shocking and therefore most popular to read about.
According to Professor Rod Morgan, the former head of the Youth Justice Board, 'It costs around £200,000 a year per place to keep a young offender in a local authority secure home', This comes at a sizeable monetary cost, and can lead to devastating social problems, which are explored in detail in the film.
This latest report suggests that the issues addressed in The Fear Factory are still ongoing, perhaps these new figures can serve as a wake-up call to politicians, colleagues in the Third, Public and Private sectors who work in this field, and to the media.
Buy The Fear Factory on DVD from our shop.