The publication of the Sentencing Review today is an official admission that forty years of sentencing policy has been racking up debts that the criminal justice system ultimately couldn’t pay back. Whatever ones views are about the right level of imprisonment in the country, it has been clear to both penal reformer and the ‘flog’em’ stalwart alike that the supply of prison places and the demand for them have been out of kilter for far too long.
The crisis in our prisons, a crisis owned across our political spectrum, has been a direct result of politicians running the system too hot for too long. In the Review, former Lord Chancellor, David Gauke, acknowledges that we need to throttle back and shift toward a new way of running the justice system. To do that, the Review proposes a radical change in our sentencing framework. It proposes, amongst other things, that a large number of prisoners can earn their release after only serving a third inside and that sentences of less than 12 months should be curtailed.
Sitting at the heart of this attempt to shift the system is a set of political choices. The Lord Chancellor, Shabana Mahmood, can be credited with many attributes and foremost today is her political bravery. Walking down the corridor to her office, you walk past a long line of her predecessors (many of whom had substantially bigger constituency majorities to bolster them) who ultimately ducked the choice she seems to have just made. If she is indeed primed to implement the Review’s recommendations, she has both won round Number 10 on the electoral politics and won over the Treasury on the money. That is a battleground that few Secretaries of State have been able to emerge from with a victory.
What, however, are the consequences of this Whitehall victory? For our part, what does this mean for the people trying to make the system work, for the people who are ensnared within it, and ultimately, for the public who seek its protection? The Review, unavoidably, has recommended shifting demand current flowing into our prisons into our community justice system, both in community sentencing and in post sentence supervision. As we wrote back in December, “simply expanding community justice… is not a silver bullet.” Though much less visible than the prison population, our probation system has a capacity crisis of its own. So the question becomes whether we have a community justice system able to take up this extra demand, and do so while delivering high quality supervision and interventions, which can keep the public safe?
There are welcome announcements to that end, not least in the expansion of problem-solving courts, deferred sentences and improving community sentences. However, we will have to wait for the Spending Review to see if there will be the people and technology investment we need in community justice. For example, will there be the money we have called for to assist the frontline in getting out from behind their laptops and into more relationship-building work. We clearly have a big commitment to the greater use of electronic monitoring. While new research suggests it can play more of a role in behavior change than I have previously given it credit for, it is still clearly the case that tens of thousands more tags is only a part answer, not least because it needs people to act on what the tags tell us about compliance.
Other, more articulate political commentators will have views on how this Sentencing Review will play out with the British electorate. But, today, one thing seems clear: a former Lord Chancellor and our current one have made a clear political choice and have, in my view, done so by unflinchingly looking at the reality of the situation. In an age of political make-believe and misinformation, that is not nothing.