Softer sentences are patronising and racist

Young black and ethnic minority offenders need schooling and jobs – not to be let off criminal acts

Last night I had dinner with two young men targeted by new guidelines issued by the Sentencing Council, which has instructed courts to hand out softer sentences to “black and minority ethnic children” and, from June, to go easy on young criminals from troubled backgrounds. For the first time courts will discriminate on racial grounds.

My two dinner guests are black and from deprived backgrounds. But they are no criminals. One is training to be a lawyer. The other is reading Ethics at a Russell Group university. Their story illustrates why these new guidelines are both patronising and unhelpful.

The Sentencing Council is right to identify a problem. The same young people turn up again and again in our courts. They come from deprived homes or from the care system. They are often neglected by alcoholic and drug-addicted parents. They have “low educational attainment”. That just about sums up the south London gang that I befriended eight years ago. I have watched them go through the criminal justice system. Two are now in jail on long sentences.

Would the new guidelines have made a difference?

The courts gave one 17-year-old a second chance after I spoke up on his behalf in a magistrates court. It did not produce quite the happy outcome envisaged by the Sentencing Committee. He recently received a 15year sentence for being the getaway driver at a robbery.

That is not a condemnation of second chances. As one young criminal said to me: “A lot of good people just make silly mistakes. As soon as I was arrested, I learnt my lesson.” He went on to make an important point. Letting people off will not make a difference unless the court is able “to give kids help to get education and a job”. Without that help the young person will be back in court within a matter of months.

On this all-important point the Sentencing Council is vague. It promises to “incorporate steps to prevent reoffending”. What are those steps to be? Who will deliver that help? Probation or the Jobcentre? I saw at first hand that these are failing institutions held in contempt by the gang members I befriended.

By making excuses for young criminals the Sentencing Council is letting off the hook the institutions which are spending a great deal of taxpayers’ money failing young people in the first place.

Take schools and our care system. As one young criminal said to me: “You graduate from school to university. We go straight from school to prison.” More than three quarters of prisoners cannot read, write or count to a standard of an 11-year-old. A successful care system at a stroke would empty a third of our prisons and shift half of all prisoners under the age of 25 out of the criminal justice system. Making excuses for these young people allows the authorities to ignore the institutions whose failure has gone a long way to putting them in court in the first place.

More importantly, it does nothing to help the young people themselves. These guidelines are only for ethnic minorities, but young white men from

READ MORE at telegraph.co.uk/ opinion disadvantaged backgrounds have even worse outcomes. What message does that send? You are black so we dismiss you as a criminal-in-waiting and pretend to be understanding about it? It is a weird world when our Sentencing Council, under the guise of being liberal, is actually both patronising and racist.

So why have my dinner guests succeeded where the gang I befriended have on the whole not? They were fortunate enough to attend Eastside Young Leaders’ Academy, a charity for young Afro-Caribbean males. They say its programmes transformed their lives. Ray Lewis, the academy’s founder and director, says: “At Eastside, we have a culture of ‘No Excuses’. We recognise, yes, you come from a deprived background but that just means you have to work harder. We believe in routine and ritual. You need to turn up on time and do your work. Routine and ritual produce results no matter what the background or level of deprivation.” It really is that uncomplicated.

The sadness is that the institutions paid to care are failing to provide that simple route out of crime and despair. And rather than “no excuses”, our Sentencing Council has given them every excuse to carry on doing so.