Ministers should consider bringing back prison ships to prevent criminals from avoiding jail sentences, a former justice secretary has said.
Sir Robert Buckland said “imaginative” ways of dealing with the prison overcrowding crisis should include HMP ships, former military bases and “virtual” jails, with convicted offenders kept in the community under effective “house arrest” through tagging and GPS technology.
His comments came as it emerged that drug dealers, violent offenders, thieves and dangerous drivers have been spared jail because judges have ruled that prisons are too full to take them.
Prisons are just 1,000 short of the maximum 85,000 inmates they can safely hold, meaning judges have been told they must take account of prison overcrowding when sentencing convicted criminals. As a result, offenders are being given suspended or community sentences rather than being imprisoned.
Sir Robert said he was “concerned” because it undermined the independence of judges, adding: “The pressure on prison places should never be a factor that should determine that a particular type or level of sentence is passed.”
He said prison ships had been used until the early 2000s when Labour sold them off. HMP Weare – the last to have housed up to 400 men in Portland, Dorset – was axed in 2005, although the port is set to host a barge housing 500 asylum-seekers from May.
“These options of barracks and prison ships need to be looked at,” said Sir Robert. “I would rather see imaginative ways in which we can open up emergency capacity by trying to find alternative provision although you are competing with immigration.”
Ministers have privately mooted the return of prison ships, although government sources said the idea has not been “progressed”.
The ships are controversial because of their echoes of the Victorian era, when convicts were held in the “dreaded hulks” – decommissioned warships anchored in the mud off Woolwich, south-east London.
Sir Robert added: “Fundamentally, part of the solution is looking at better ways in which we can manage prisoners in the community with proper supervision. You can, for example, have a virtual prison using technology like tags and GPS where you could put someone effectively under house arrest.”
Dominic Raab, the Justice Secretary, has already been forced to commission police cells to take convicted prisoners, allowed the earlier release of criminals, including burglars on tags, and fast-tracked inmates to open prisons in order to ease the overcrowding crisis.
Judges have been asked to jail fewer convicted criminals by Lord Justice Edis, the senior presiding judge of England and Wales, after Mr Raab wrote to Lord Burnett, the Lord Chief Justice, warning of the impact that current levels of crowding in jails will have on prisoners.
Among criminals who have escaped prison as a result are a prisoner who threw boiling water in a prison officer’s face, a DHL driver convicted of seven counts of theft, a drug dealer who sold cocaine and heroin, a lorry driver who attacked a trucker in a road rage incident and a carpenter who caused a high-speed crash while fleeing police.
Sir Bob Neill, the chairman of the Commons justice committee, said: “It sends out a poor message. It undermines confidence in the just deserts, which are an important part of the sentencing process.
“It puts the judges in an invidious situation. They are supposed to be independent and pass the appropriate sentence based on all the facts of the case. It has made it harder for them to do that.”
Priti Patel, a former home secretary, said: “Public safety must never be compromised, and the courts should send crooks to jail and the Government must make sure more prison places are available.”
A Ministry of Justice spokesman said: “We are pressing ahead with the biggest expansion of prison places in over a century – investing £4 billion to deliver 20,000 extra places.
“We are experiencing short-term pressure on the prison estate, which is why we are building 1,000 rapid deployment cells and have activated Operation Safeguard as a temporary measure to increase capacity.”