Justice committee condemns failure in government’s sentencing policy
In response to the publication today of the Justice select committee report ‘Towards Effective Sentencing’, Juliet Lyon, director, Prison Reform Trust, said:
This blistering report must make ministers review their failing prisons policy before they disappear down the bottomless public spending pit of titan jails.
What this committee of MPs from all parties found was that the prisons crisis is a direct result of the government failing to follow its twin track strategy of reserving prison for serious and violent offenders and using community orders for minor offenders.
Instead, our prisons are full to bursting with thousands of people serving ineffective, system-clogging short prison sentences for minor crimes simply because the Ministry of Justice did not prioritise spending on non-custodial sentences despite their proving to be more effective at cutting crime.
The way out of this hole is not to carrying on digging by building huge super-sized titan prisons in a futile attempt to catch up with rising prison numbers. Instead the billions earmarked for Titans and the massive prison building programme could be used far more effectively to resource sentencing options which would see addicts getting treatment, the mentally ill gaining access to healthcare and petty offenders doing enforced community work to pay back for the harm they have caused.
The prisons crisis is a crisis of the government’s own making and, despite crime figures falling, is doing untold damage to public confidence in the criminal justice system as people wrongly fear that overcrowding means people who should be locked up are getting let off.
The Prison Reform Trust particularly welcomes the report’s findings on the failures of the flagship IPPs which we first exposed in our Indefinitely Maybe report last year. Since April 2005 this badly drafted, draconian indeterminate sentence for public protection has netted over 5,000 people and accounts for around 5% of today’s prison population. Despite some tweaking of the system, some 600 people have already served their minimum tariff but will remain in prison because they have had no opportunity to demonstrate that they pose no risk if released. Numbers are growing and the Ministry of Justice now faces a series of costly legal challenges.
The Committee has asked government to reconsider its inexplicable failure to fund alternatives to custody for women despite cross party agreement, massive public support and offers of help from major charitable trusts. It was concerned about the overuse of youth custody which acts as a fast track to adult jails.
A sentencing commission with firm guidelines for judges, legislative advice for politicians and clear information for the public would hold things steady and stop prisons policy from lurching to crisis to crisis.
