ABSTRACT
Michael Howard’s period as Home Secretary (1993-7) is often seen as being marked solely by his claim that ‘Prison works’. While this assertion had very clear implications for the probation service and its work, various other developments took place while he was at Queen Anne’s Gate that were just as signifi cant for probation. But ‘Prison works’ symbolises the crucial turn towards a more punitive penal climate with which we have been living ever since. Prior to 1993, while the rehabilitation of offenders, community penalties and the probation service might not have been consistently encouraged by governments, they were at least tolerated and usually acknowledged as a useful approach to dealing with offenders. After 1993, a grudging toleration became the norm alongside persistent criticism and regular attempts to make changes to the service – changes which were all too easily seen as efforts to undermine its viability. The cross-party consensus about crime and how to deal with it may have looked shaky at various times since 1945, but it had – on the whole – held together reasonably well, until the Thatcher years. By 1993 , however, the Conservatives were not doing well in the polls and a decision was made to make law and order a key policy issue:
Alarmed by their deteriorating position in public opinion polls, both in general and on crime, the Conservatives rapidly cast their previous, and longgerminated penal policy to the winds and sought to reoccupy lost terrain. First Kenneth Clarke, then Michael Howard, as the new Conservative Home Secretaries after 1992, quickly dropped the key reforming clauses of the 1991 Act: unit fi nes (which linked the level of fi nes to disposable income) and the need normally to disregard previous convictions in sentencing. Michael Howard’s notorious ‘Prison Works’ speech to the Tory Party Conference in 1993 was the climax to this somewhat panic-stricken shift.
