The Centre's Director, Phil Bowen, reflects on the announcement of the Sentencing Review and the opportunity it presents to put our criminal justice system on the road to recovery.
The Sentencing Review, announced earlier, this week has been broadly welcomed, and a number of people from across the political divides have urged that it is used as an opportunity to stop sentencing being a political football. Some have, however, been unable to resist points scoring about early releases. It is therefore reasonable to be sceptical that politicians will be able to resist the urge, when the Review concludes, to attack recommendations that seek to reduce the sentencing of people for crimes.
However, we have to be optimists. As we highlighted in our paper, Systems Shift, back in June, we need to both protect the system from overloading, and then fundamentally shift how our criminal justice system operates. As we recommended, the Government has done some of the first part of this through a series of emergency measures needed to be taken to alleviate the prison population crisis. The Sentencing Review is a larger intervention, aimed at putting the system on the road to recovery.
One of the elements of the review is to “examine the use and composition of non-custodial sentences, including robust community alternatives to prison and the use of fines.” At the Centre, we have long called for a new approach to community justice, one that rethinks and shifts how we deliver community supervision. This includes re-focusing community sentences, prioritizing immediacy, and ensuring we use the best technology to assist the frontline in getting out from behind their laptops and into more relational work. We are also glad that the review recognizes that, for some, fines have disproportionately negative impacts, a point highlighted in our research published in May. Our work on women in the justice system, not least in helping spread women’s problem-solving courts, is also being considered as part of the review.
However, we know, and Ministers know, that they are walking a narrow path in trying to reduce overall demand in the system. They know that simply expanding community sentencing, especially with a probation system itself gripped in a capacity crisis, is not a silver bullet. They will have to take proper chunks out of the medium and long-term prison population. And that narrow path shrinks even further because they know they will need to convince the public that this will continue to keep them safe and also not get walloped for it by the media and the Opposition.
However, there is also no other option. We can’t go on with waves of increasingly complex cases surging into a system that has become increasingly fragile and more fractured over the past decade. We look forward to engaging with the Review.