News Roundup 8

This article in the Guardian reveals the magistrates are not happy:-

Magistrates quitting in 'considerable' numbers over court closures

Magistrates are resigning in “considerable” numbers, the head of their national body has said, after scores of court closures and swingeing government cuts. Forty-seven magistrates courts have shut this year, one-tenth of courts in England and Wales, with significant numbers of judges resigning early from the unpaid position.

Malcolm Richardson, the chairman of the Magistrates Association, said: “Magistrates deal with more than 90% of the criminal cases that come to court and they cost 1% of the HM Courts and Tribunal Service budget. But we’re getting a bit tired of being treated like the 1% and not the 90%.”

The Ministry of Justice (MoJ) would not disclose the number of magistrates who had resigned this year, but the association said the figure was considerable. It comes after at least 75 magistrates resigned last year over the controversial criminal courts charge, which caused outrage among law groups before it was scrapped by Michael Gove.

The mass resignations and court closures have left the magistracy stretched, Richardson said, adding that “nobody [in government] seems to have a plan” for the future of the volunteer judges.

“There is no evidence of a strategy for the use of magistrates. What are we for in the 21st century? What are we for in the brave new world, which is starting to be revealed under the courts reform programme?” he said. “Magistrates feel they are not, and have not been, engaged with in the determination of what that future looks like … The consequences of that for some magistrates, particularly those who are getting towards retirement, is to say ‘why am I carrying on?’ It’s a difficult question to answer.”

Three magistrates who have resigned or retired since September told the Guardian morale was at rock bottom among the judges, who are only paid expenses. They said magistrates felt ignored and unappreciated as a result of cost cutting, ranging from court closures to buildings falling into disrepair. More trivial money-saving measures, such as cutting back on coffee and newspapers in the judges’ quarters, and using cheaper, thinner paper, had also irritated the magistracy, they said.

Janet Alcock, a Conservative councillor in Clitheroe, Lancashire, said she “resigned in despair” in September after 20 years as a magistrate. The role has been reduced to a “soul-destroying production line” of speeding fines and licence fee evasions, Alcock said, adding that she gave up encouraging people to become magistrates a long time ago.

Alcock said she had become “extremely frustrated” at having to issue fines to defendants who would never be able to pay, and the victim surcharge, which “just seems to be another way of dressing up that they’re taking more money off them”.

“You know, realistically, from the point of view of collecting the fines, you’re not going to get it, which makes it extremely frustrating,” she said. “Everybody’s always calling me ‘the hanging judge’ because I’m saying things like instead of fining people who can’t afford it, send them out working … Political correctness wouldn’t allow you to do anything like that.

“But that would be far more satisfying to the public, I think, than for people to appear six months later owing even more than they did at the beginning. It’s just frustrating for everybody.”

Myra Robinson, who retired last month as a bench chairman of Newcastle magistrates, said fining those who could not afford to pay was morally wrong, but there was little that magistrates could do about it. “It’s just ticking boxes and following down – if someone did this then that’s the punishment. There’s no flexibility,” she said.

“I’d worked all my career with young offenders and kids with problems. I felt I knew a lot of the families with problems in Newcastle, and I could see behind what they’d just done and think what would be an appropriate way of dealing with it. My hands have been tied for many years now. People can’t afford fines.”

A third recently resigned magistrate, who did not want to be named, said the court closures meant “losing local justice for local people”. In some cases, proposed closures meant it would be impossible for defendants or witnesses travelling by public transport to get to a court for 10am.

“I was constantly getting emails or texts or phone calls to say that we urgently need magistrates to sit in places like Scarborough. That would imply there is a shortage,” said the magistrate, who was based nearly 90 miles (145km) away in Halifax, West Yorkshire.

Forty-seven magistrates courts closed their doors between March and September under government proposals to reduce the £500m annual cost of the courts estate. A further 45 are due to shut by September 2017, meaning one-fifth of all courts in England and Wales will have disappeared in 19 months.

An MoJ spokeswoman said: “The magistracy remains at the heart of our justice system. We are investing £1bn to reform and digitise our courts to deliver swifter justice, and we are working closely with the judiciary to encourage the recruitment of underrepresented groups.

“Closing underused and dilapidated court buildings will allow us to reinvest in the justice system and make the best use of technology, improving the experience for all court users, in particular vulnerable victims and witnesses.”

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The reports on prisons are getting worse. This from the Guardian:-

Regime at HMP Hindley one of worst ever seen, say prison inspectors

The regime at the category C Hindley jail near Wigan is “one of the worst and possibly one of the very worst that inspectors had ever seen in this type of prison”, an official watchdog report has said. The chief inspector of prisons, Peter Clarke, said the Hindley regime includes regular shutdowns when inmates, including young adults, are locked in their cells for more than 24 hours at a time.

His report published on Tuesday also highlights poor food, including mouldy bread, filthy cells, and a high level of violence with 126 assaults in just six months, including 35 fights. Half the prisoners told inspectors it was easy to get hold of illegal drugs, which were more accessible than clean clothes, sheets or books from the library.

Peter Dawson, the director of the Prison Reform Trust, said although they were used to dreadful inspection reports about dilapidated, overcrowded Victorian prisons, HMP Hindley “is none of these things, and this damning verdict is all the more troubling as a result”.

The latest critical inspection report comes after peers in the House of Lords cited the record level of prison suicides so far this year. Justice ministers responded by acknowledging the seriousness of the crisis and highlighting their plans to recruit 2,500 more prison officers, including 400 immediately for the 10 most challenged prisons.

Hindley in Greater Manchester opened in 1961 as a borstal and in 2015 was converted from a youth jail into a category C prison for young offenders and adult males serving sentences of up to four years. The inspection was carried out in July, when the jail held 515 inmates and was within its operational capacity.

But the inspectors found a “totally inadequate regime” in which more than two-thirds of prisoners said they received less than six hours a day out of their cells and many experienced less than that on a daily basis.

“The inadequate regime was made worse by significant slippage and regular shutdowns, which meant that most prisoners regularly experienced being locked in their cells for more than 24 hours. As a result, prisoners were often not unlocked to attend work or education, and were denied daily access to showers and telephones,” the report said. Residential wings and landings were dirty, with inspectors finding mould and fungus, while single cells were small and poorly ventilated, and many were filthy.

“The regime at Hindley was one of the worst, and possibly the very worst, that inspectors had ever seen in this type of prison,” said Clarke. “The length of time for which young adults and adults alike were locked up was, in our considered view, unnecessary, unjustifiable and counterproductive. Almost every aspect of prison life was adversely affected by the regime.”

He cited the problem of the staff association opposing a move to put microwaves on the wings as “symptomatic of what seemed to have gone wrong at Hindley”. He said many prisoners locked up all day only received a hot meal at 4pm and were given an inadequate breakfast pack to see them through to lunchtime the next day. A move to install microwaves would have been an improvement but “good intentions were not being translated into action on the wings”.

He added: “To make progress, there needs to be a very clear recognition of what is good at Hindley, and also where there needs to be fundamental change. Many examples of good practice could be found in the chaplaincy, education and healthcare. The same could not be said for residential areas. There needs to be an honest appraisal of the culture that predominates among some staff in these areas.”

Michael Spurr, the chief executive of the National Offender Management Service, said since the inspection a detailed improvement plan had been developed to address the weaknesses identified by inspectors.

“Progress has been made to improve safety and purposeful activity with more prisoners engaged in high-quality work and training opportunities,” said Spurr. “Additional staff have been transferred into the prison to support the improvements required and the governor is working closely with Greater Manchester police to tackle gang behaviour and violence in the prison.”

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Finally, this from the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies reminds us how politicians of all hues have done much to create the mess we now find ourselves in:-

Tough talk costs lives

The endless calls for tough community sentences do more harm than good, argues Richard Garside

Michael Gove is the latest politician to accept that we lock up too many people in prison. 'It is an inconvenient truth – which I swerved to an extent while in office – that we send too many people to prison', he told an audience in London last week. 'Prison is expensive, anti-social, inefficient and often de-humanising', he added.

Mr Gove's 'swerve' while Justice Secretary unfortunately took in the distracting irrelevance of 'reform prisons'. He would have done better to take on the far more important task of reforming prisons. Key to this task, as Mr Gove now appears to recognise, is a reduction in the number of prisoners needlessly locked up.

Appearing before the House of Commons Justice Committee earlier this week, Lord Thomas, the Lord Chief Justice, said that with the prison population being 'very, very high at the moment', there was a strong case for 'really tough, and I do mean tough, community penalties'. Such is the state of the debate about alternatives to imprisonment that the most senior judge in the land is reduced to emphasising just how tough he wants to be.

The problem here is that no community sentence is ever likely to be as 'tough' as six months in Pentonville prison. David Cameron appeared to understand this when, in a speech in February this year, he called for 'a new approach' to prisons policy, one that did not 'trap us into often false choices between so-called tough or soft approaches'. In the same speech, and with no sense of irony, Mr Cameron promised to 'dramatically toughen up community sentences'.

Last year, Michael Gove, told the Justice Committee: 

'I do believe that there is the possibility through electronic monitoring, tagging, to find ways of making sure there are some offenders in the future who can have genuinely tough and effective community sentences'. 

In March 2013 the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government promised 'tough and effective' community sentences for women. The previous October, Mr Gove's predecessor as Justice Secretary, Chris Grayling, wrote in a Foreword to a consultation response that 'tougher community sentences may give more options to sentencers who currently feel that prison is the only robust choice'. Ken Clarke, another former Justice Secretary, announced in March 2012 that the government was 'overhauling community sentences to ensure they are tough, credible and robust'.

Jack Straw, Justice Secretary during the last Labour government, said in February 2008:

Prison is the right place for the most serious and violent offenders but there are currently people in prison who would be better rehabilitated and therefore less likely to reoffend elsewhere... so we must ensure that courts have tough community sentences at their disposal to deal with less serious, non-violent offenders.

The government was 'bringing in tough new community sentences', the former Labour government's strategic plan for criminal justicestated in July 2004. The Halliday review of sentencing, published in July 2001, found evidence of a 'toughening up of sentencing', including 'increased numbers of the more intensive of community sentences'.

Where has all this tough talk got us? In 2001, when Halliday was being published, the prison population stood at around 65,000. When Lord Thomas was speaking of 'really tough' community sentences earlier this week, it stood at over 85,000.

Far from acting as 'alternatives' to prison, community sentences tend towards widening the net of punishment and coercion, as research by the Centre some years ago, as well as more recently, has shown. Tough talk on community sentences merely feeds this particular beast. This year's 'tough' community penalty becomes next year's 'soft' one. And so it goes on.

The collateral damage of all this rhetoric can be found in the high levels of suicide and self-harm among prisoners; of stressful working conditions for prison staff and living conditions for prisoners; and of deteriorating buildings and infrastructure. Tough talk really does cost lives. It is time for it to stop.

Richard Garside