‘The dangerous criminals belong behind bars’

THE ENTIRE point of the justice system, the fundamental reason it exists, should be to punish the guilty and protect the innocent. And if the public – good, law-abiding Sunday Express readers such as yourself – are to have confidence in that system, if you are to believe that justice is truly being done in your name, then that is what you need to see happening.

You want to see dangerous criminals given the sentences they deserve, keeping them off the streets and out of your community until they no longer pose a threat.

You want to be certain that – above all else – the overriding priority of the criminal justice system is public protection. But too often that just isn’t the case.

Judges who want to impose tougher sentences have their hands tied by a complex system.

Despite changes over the past few years, some violent criminals are still being released after serving just half their time behind bars.

And dangerous individuals can be turned loose even if everyone agrees that they pose a serious threat to society – as we saw when Sudesh Amman was freed to launch a savage attack on innocent shoppers in south London earlier this year.

It cannot continue to be this way. When a convicted criminal is handed their sentence, it should be protecting you and your family, that is the number one consideration.

I’m absolutely determined to make that happen, and this week the government will be setting out plans to ensure it does.

For example, after Amman’s rampage we banned people locked up for terror offences from receiving automatic early release.

Now we’re going to go further. As things stand, someone serving time for an unrelated crime like robbery could tell prison officers that he had become radicalised and was planning a terrorist attack in the outside world – but if he had served half his sentence there would be little they could do to stop him being set free and becoming a further watch risk for security services.

You don’t need me to tell you that’s absolutely crazy, which is why we’re going to change the law so that if there’s evidence a prisoner has become a significant risk to the public while behind bars – even if they’re serving time for something other than terrorism – we’ll be able to intervene and ask the parole board to decide whether they’re safe for release. If the answer is No, they will remain locked up – keeping the public safe.

Of course, some individuals are so dangerous or their crimes so abhorrent that they should never be released.

In such cases judges have long had the option of imposing a “whole-life order”.

It’s a rarely used tool, but to keep the public safe it’s vital that a judge can deploy it where necessary.

So, to make sure that they can, we’re going to remove a loophole that lets some truly despicable criminals avoid such a sentence because they’re under 21 at the time of their crime.

To be absolutely clear, we’re not talking about permanently locking up young people who make teenage mistakes or commit youthful indiscretions.

But if – like Manchester Arena bombing accomplice Hashem Abedi – you plot, in a cold, calculating and deliberate manner, to murder and maim dozens of people then it doesn’t matter if you’re “only” 18, 19 or 20 when you do so.

You’re an adult, and a judge should have the power to keep you off the streets for life – and we’re going to lower the minimum age for whole-life sentences to 18 so that can happen.

‘We are going to remove a loophole’

WHILE whole-life orders are extremely rare, somewhere in England and Wales someone is handed a prison term every seven minutes of every day – so it’s vital that we get the process of sentencing and release right.

We need more and better rehabilitation behind bars, improved monitoring of and support for ex-prisoners and more effective non-custodial sentences for low-risk offenders – all of which we’ll be looking at as we make good on the promises we made in last year’s election manifesto.

But we cannot lose sight of the need for a justice system that, above all else, keeps the people of this country safe.

Dangerous criminals belong not on our streets but behind bars – with public protection the single most important principle of sentencing. That is what these changes will deliver.