Time for Mr Straw to rock the jailhouse boat

The home secretary should consider a more imaginative approach to the use of imprisonment, argues Sean McConville.

No news was the best news for penal policy in the Queen's Speech. Five flawed criminal justice acts since 1990 and a raft of related legislation mean that a period of reflection is vital. A dispassionate prisons review is needed. The last royal commission was over 30 years ago.

The futility of the largest prison population in history and no projected limit is emphasised by the reintroduction, after 140 years, of a prison hulk in British waters.

Officials might be asked to look at more imaginative use of imprisonment. With only modest increase in risk, open and low security prisons could be used for many more offenders, and schemes such as home and work leave greatly expanded.

Many offenders have the maturity to surrender to their bail and can be trusted in open conditions not to misbehave or abscond. Twenty years ago the Commons expenditure committee suggested that such offenders, if sentenced to imprisonment, should be sent home until space became available for them. When called up, they would then make their own way to prison. Passing these tests would prove their suitability for an open institution.

The "call-up" approach for the non-violent and dependable offender could go further. Our system has custodial and non-custodial sentences, but nothing in between. Perhaps every metropolitan area should have a half-way house. These could function as hostels for bail, pre-release and work release and as weekend prisons. For all but pre-release prisoners, assignment would be by sentence of the court. In the largest cities there is certainly a pool of imprisonable offenders whom the courts would be willing to punish by part-time custody, allowing them to keep their jobs and discharge family obligations, while working off their punishment. Misbehaviour would be minimised by fear of full-time prison.

Perhaps there could be more imaginative use, too, of conventional closed prisons. Could we not have a group of selective prisons, assignment to which would be by competitive application? A decade ago United States chief justice Warren Burger campaigned for "factories behind fences" to replace some of that country's dismal penitentiaries. Some English prisons have impressive production shops, but none has been a full-blooded commercial enterprise. A proper industrial prison would hire and fire, taking the best applicants from conventional prisons, and returning those who underperform or misbehave. Productivity and quality would be rewarded by equivalent wages.

The decision to abolish direct entry into governorships did a lot to homogenise prison management, but hardly improved it. Wisdom is hard to teach, but it came in some abundance with those who had decided to make prison a second career. Years ago I lectured the assistant governors' course at the Wakefield Staff College. The group included a retired submarine commander, a former vicar and an ex-miner. To choke off this supply of experience was a self-damaging act of vandalism.

Jack Straw should resist any impulse originating in the nerve ends of amputated socialism. Prison staff should not have the right to strike restored. He should also avoid the mistake of dismissing agency status as a political gimmick. Even when local prisons were owned and run by the justices, home secretaries were grilled in Parliament about them and the more absurd decisions of magistrates, just as they were about county and borough police forces. There will never be a time when the home secretary can evade oversight responsibility for prisons - whether their management is an agency or a department of the home office. The key question is how directly the minister should be involved.

The prison service needs the match between responsibility and authority conferred by agency or another degree of devolution. Ministers should appoint and remove senior officials, set out policy and procedure, and control funding - and then step back. Much of Michael Howard's obsessive micro-management came from mutually exploitable uncertainties in the relationship between the home secretary and the prison service. An incoming government must find a new balance.

Perhaps Mr Straw might go with one bold idea. The 1877 nationalisation of local prisons has never been a success. Why not denationalise? Keep a few long-term and maximum-security prisons under the Government's indirect remit, and return short-term and lower security-rated prisons to local control. Regional management under the scrutiny of bodies akin to police committees could reconnect prisons to their communities. It is an idea worthy of a royal commission's attention.

Sean McConville is professor of criminal justice at Queen Mary and Westfield College.