Longer or Shorter Sentences?

As always, Rob Allen proves helpful when trying to make sense of where exactly criminal justice policy might be heading:-   

Short Changed?

Soon to be ex Justice Secretary David Gauke rightly told us in a farewell speech last week that a short spell in prison doesn’t protect the public, doesn’t serve as much of a deterrent and exacerbates those already deep-rooted difficulties an individual faces. Sadly, his own 18-month spell as Justice Secretary hasn’t proved long enough for him to do much about the problem. He should really have started tackling the issue much sooner. He seems to have listened to his deputy’s Rory Stewart’s foolish view that there had been too much talk “about grand issues of sentencing policy,reoffending and the policy context.” In reality there hasn’t been enough.

David Gauke has done what he can to encourage his successor to take forward his progressive reforms to sentencing. He’s bequeathed them a Single Departmental Plan for the MoJ that aims to protect the public from harm caused by offenders through building confidence in an effective probation system, reducing the use of prison and increasing the use of community and alternative sentences. And he’s got his department to produce a sheaf of research showing an £18 billion cost of reoffending, very high level of needs experienced by people who commit crime and the fact that sentencing them to short term custody- even with supervision after release- is associated with higher proven reoffending than if they'd instead got community or suspended sentence orders. But will all this be enough to keep a policy of reducing prison numbers in place?

A somewhat different view has been put forward by new Tory think tank Onward who argue that a greater number of persistent offenders should go to prison for longer periods. Disappointingly, on penal policy, Onward's “new ideas for the next generation" turn out to be Michael Howard's Prison Works vision from the last one. Onward seem to want “three strikes and you’re out” mandatory minimum prison terms, arguing that “super prolific offenders” account for more crime and get fewer prison terms that in the past. They also want more prisons to be built. (Their Director Will Tanner used to work for G4S).

The statistics Onward deploy seem arguable. With fewer crimes being cleared up, it’s not surprising if “the usual suspects” loom larger in the population of those who are brought to justice. It would also be odd if the calamitous decline in prison performance and debacle of probation privatisation have not had negative impacts on the unfortunate people who have experienced them as service users.

Dealing with petty persistent offenders raises some fundamental questions of sentencing philosophy in particular about the weight that should be attached by courts to previous convictions. On one view, anything but a very limited weight can amount to a kind of double- or more- jeopardy in which you can end up being punished in perpetuity for past misdeeds.

The short-lived 1991 Criminal Justice Act controversially provided that an offence should not be regarded as more serious because of any previous convictions of the offender or any failure of his to respond to previous sentences.

On another view, repeat offenders deserve to be dealt with more harshly, because spurning a chance to go straight and continuing to flout authority make bad behaviour worse and elevate the need to protect the public above concerns about reform and rehabilitation. For the last 25 years, courts have been required to find recidivist offenders more culpable; and many of those who end up getting short prison sentences are likely to have simply exhausted the patience of the magistrates and judges.

Whatever Onward might think about the feebleness of the courts, the fact remains that since 2010 for the more serious types of cases , the proportion of offenders going to prison has gone up along with the length of their sentences. They are right to call for a review of Sentencing Guidelines, but if the Sentencing Council were to do its job and properly have regard to the cost of different sentences and to their relative effectiveness in preventing re-offending, the conclusions would be very different from Onward’s dismal prescription.

Unfortunately, evidence may struggle to prevail in the forthcoming government. Back in 2011, several up and coming Tories argued the need to reverse the tide of soft justice, “not ashamed to say that prisons should be tough unpleasant and uncomfortable places”. Liz Truss, Dominic Raab, Priti Patel and others who now expect jobs from Johnson, argued that what was to become Gauke’s policy of a presumption against short prison sentences is the wrong approach and that we should be doing exactly the opposite - ensuring that persistent offenders are imprisoned for longer periods. “When the law is broken, our condemnation should be unequivocal. The primary purpose of our justice system is to protect our society, not to act as a welfare service for convicted criminals.”

Such a forlorn view may bring an end to short prison sentences – but only by replacing them with longer ones.

Rob Allen

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According to former Telegraph editor Max Hastings, we might be about to get lumbered with a very tasteless joke as Prime Minister, but the Tories are clearly re-grouping:-

About Onward

Onward is a powerful ideas factory for centre-right thinkers and leaders. We exist to make Britain fairer, more prosperous and more united, by generating a new wave of modernising ideas and a fresh kind of politics that reaches out to new groups of people.

We believe in a mainstream conservatism – one that recognises the value of markets and supports the good that government can do, is unapologetic about standing up to vested interests, and assiduous in supporting the hardworking, aspirational and those left behind. Our goal is to address the needs of the whole country: young as well as old; urban as well as rural; and for all parts of the UK – particularly places that feel neglected or ignored in Westminster.

We will achieve this by developing practical policies that work. Our team has worked both at a high level in government and for successful thinktanks. We know how to produce big ideas that resonate with policymakers, the media and the public. We will engage ordinary people across the country and work with them to make our ideas a reality.

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This from The Cambridge Student, TCS November 2018:-

Will Tanner – Top Adviser to Theresa May

You may not have heard of him, but Will Tanner has been at the heart of British politics for the past five years. From 2013 to 2017 he was a close adviser to Theresa May in the Home Office, before becoming the deputy head of Number 10’s policy unit when she became Prime Minister. Now he is the director of the think-tank Onward, a centre-leaning forum for generating policies in line with “mainstream conservatism”. He was recently hosted by Trinity College’s Politics Society, where he answered audience questions surrounding his role in drafting the Conservative Party’s controversial 2017 general election manifesto, Theresa May’s vision for Britain, and, of course, Brexit.

I was able to ask the first question, and decided to raise the issue of the negative reaction to Universal Credit, the government’s amalgamation of six pre-existing welfare payments into one. This heated debate has been felt in Cambridge – CUSU Disabled Students’ officer Emrys Travis was recently reported in Varsity as calling the system: “the epitome of a litany of government cuts and incompetence”. Will began by acknowledging that the implementation has been far from smooth. “Universal Credit is one of those very well-intentioned reforms that is absolutely right in principle, but has been delivered very badly in practise […] The big issue politically is as a result of the 2015 budget changes, which have cut the work allowances and introduced extra waiting days, and basically took a lot of money out of the system which means that, instead of everyone benefitting […] there are quite a large number of families – millions of families – who will lose out.” Yet, he argued that there is a “very good reason” why welfare spending has taken a hit over the past few years. A key problem with the system, he tells me, has been the centralised approach to its roll-out. “Unfortunately, Universal Credit will be fixed through 1000 small little bitty things that no-one really understands, rather than big expansive changes that politicians have been arguing for. And I think there’s a really, really big danger of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Universal Credit is a good thing, we just need to make it work properly, rather than what Labour are arguing for which is chucking the whole thing, without any reasonable alternative – they literally have no alternative […] We need to depoliticise the issue.”

Will has been at the centre of Conservative policy formulation under Theresa May, and this was the theme of many of the questions he went on to answer. “The proudest thing I ever did in government was something you will never have heard of […] we created something called Alternative Places of Safety. It was £15 million, so in the scheme of government nothing, literally change down the back of the sofa for the NHS, and we created health-led safe spaces for people with mental health problems, so that they don’t get taken to a police cell when they are in crisis.” The results of this system have been remarkable. As he explained, through the operation of the “12 or 15” of these centres up and down the country, “we reduced the number of people with mental health problems being taken to police cells by something like 85% in the last 4 years.”

Nevertheless, Will must be painfully aware that it is not the successful policies that make the headline news. Famously, the Conservative’s 2017 manifesto contained a new plan for funding social care costs by making everyone with combined assets of more that £100,000 pay for their care. The scheme – dubbed a ‘dementia tax’ by pundits – was widely panned, and eventually dropped. Will was personally involved in the decision to keep the plan in the manifesto, and was quick to defend it. “At the heart of it was a progressive principle that if you have more wealth, then you should probably contribute more […] We set the floor deliberately high – £100,000 for a property, so that something like half of the population would be insulated from paying for their care costs.” He admits that, because the election was called so quickly, not all the details were fully prepared. “When journalists started asking difficult questions we didn’t have very good answers […] In hindsight I think the U-turn – [May’s] ‘nothing has changed’ speech – was bad, because it undermined her brand [as someone who] told the hard truth. The thing about that manifesto was that it told a lot of hard truths. We had the triple lock on pensions going, we had free school meals being cut to just means tested […] we had the education budget being at not quite real-terms levels. All these are things that people had deliberately not touched for three or four elections because they knew that they would be very difficult. There’s that old saying ‘campaign in poetry, govern in prose’. It’s true. Don’t load too many difficult hard truths into your manifesto.”

Overall, he believes that the 2017 election was called for the right reasons. “The gamble was that we could afford to lose a few points in order to give ourselves a mandate to do all the things the country should have done years and years ago. That’s a really noble intention – we were naïve perhaps. Also, Labour, in contrast with other elections, basically went full tilt at socialism and they were unabashed […] With Jeremy Corbyn you had somebody who was quite literally promising the world and not thinking he was ever going to have to deliver.”

Finally, an audience member brought up Brexit, the cloud hanging over any discussion of contemporary British politics. “I had a conversation with quite senior people in government recently who said that Brexit takes up between 85 and 90 per cent of government’s time. It will be a hell of a lot worse if we enter into ‘no deal’ territory in the next few months.” He laments the fact that “Government doesn’t have the bandwidth do new policy thinking anymore […] I personally think, and when I was in Downing Street I was arguing this, that the only way to do Brexit properly is to treat it as one side of the coin. You have to do the domestic vision alongside. The difficulty is that politics has become so bound up in the individual nuances of people’s individual Brexit position. That psychodrama is taking all of the oxygen out of politics.”

Will Tanner is of a political class that is becoming steadily rarer in today’s world – the moderates. Although many will disagree with what he says, it makes a change from the increasingly polarised tenor of contemporary debate.