The government has accepted most of the recommendations in David Gauke’s Independent sentencing review, the Ministry of Justice has announced. ‘The majority of the recommendations have been accepted today in principle – with a sentencing bill due in the coming months,’ it says.
The recommendations amount to a comprehensive overhaul of sentencing policy, with a move away from short sentences – except in ‘exceptional circumstances’ – towards more use of suspended sentences and community punishments. The review was commissioned by the government after the prison system came ‘dangerously close’ to collapse last summer.
There will now be a ‘presumption against custodial sentences of less than a year’, the ministry states, in favour of ‘tough community sentences’ as around 60 per cent of people receiving sentences of 12 months or less go on to reoffend within a year. There will also be more intensive supervision courts, to ‘tackle the root causes of crime such as alcohol and drug abuse – forcing repeat offenders to take part in tough treatment programmes or face prison’.
Dame Carol Black’s Independent review of drugs pointed out that many people in prison were serving short sentences for mostly acquisitive crimes related to drug use, with little opportunity for effective treatment.
The justice secretary will ‘go further’ than the sentencing review’s recommendations, the government states, including ‘developing new ways in which offenders can undertake tough, unpaid work.’ This could potentially include street cleaning and filling in potholes, it says.
Prisoner release dates will also be ‘more dependent’ on their behaviour, to try to ensure more prisoners engage with education and employment activities. Most offenders on standard determinate sentences will be released after serving between a third and a half of their sentence. The government has also announced an increase in probation funding, alongside a ‘massive expansion’ in surveillance of offenders through increased use of tagging.
‘Our prisons are, once again, running out of space and it is vital that the implications are understood,’ said the lord chancellor, Shabana Mahmood. ‘If our prisons collapse, courts are forced to suspend trials, the police must halt their arrests. Crime goes unpunished, criminals run amok and chaos reigns. We face the breakdown of law and order in this country. The prison population is now rising by 3,000 each year and we are heading back towards zero capacity. It now falls to this government to end this cycle of crisis.’