Brexit is such a mess. Anything could happen in the next few days/weeks so at this moment in time speculation about the future is pretty fruitless. Of course that won’t deter me or anybody else from trying… but it does today ahead of the Big Vote tomorrow.
Instead, it is worth focusing on a corner of government in the Ministry of Justice where, over the weekend, the highly able prisons minister, Rory Stewart, has just proposed a radical reform of sentencing. He is considering banning prison sentences of less than 6 months, an initiative long advocated by the Prison Reform Trust.
If the judicial system is a measure of how civilised a society we are then we don’t score well. It is failing across the board.
We have the highest imprisonment rate in Western Europe. In the last 30 years, the prison population has risen 70% to over 80,000 and yet there is no link between the size of the prison population and levels of crime according to the National Audit Office.
According to the Prison Reform Trust, prisons are in a mess. Rates of self-harm are at the highest level ever recorded and assaults on staff have tripled in the last 5 years. 46% of prisons are rated ‘of concern’ or ‘of serious concern’ by HM Prisons and Probation Service, also the highest on record. 81 out of 120 prisons in England and Wales are overcrowded yet the number of frontline operational prison staff was cut by 26% from 2010 to 2017. The government is only just starting to reverse this disastrous decline.
For those on either side of the sentencing debate, cutting short term sentences makes sense. Two thirds of prisoners given custodial sentences of less than 12 months reoffend and community sentences are proven to reduce reoffending more effectively, particularly for those who have a large number of previous offences or people with mental health problems. Yet their use has halved in only a decade. Crazy.
If this reform was implemented, it would reduce the current prison population by 3,500. More than half of the 86,000 offenders sentenced to immediate custody in England and Wales in 2017 were handed sentences of less than 6 months. The cumulative impact of such reform would be enormous.
If this initiative is implemented, it could transform our approach to managing the justice system with real benefits to society, saving money at the same time. Well done Rory Stewart for starting the debate. There is some good being done, albeit hidden, in a generally dire government transfixed by Brexit.
Inside Right Politics 