Fix dire justice system to make sentence revamp work, say peers
SPARING criminals jail sentences will not stop reoffending without fixing the “dire” criminal justice system, Lord Blunkett has warned Rishi Sunak.
The Prime Minister’s plans to punish low-level criminals such as burglars, thieves and drunken drivers with community sentences rather than putting them in overcrowded jails will fail unless there is a “rethink” to strengthen alternatives to prison, said Lord Blunkett, speaking on behalf of a committee of peers.
Writing for The Daily Telegraph, the ex-labour home secretary said the Lords justice and home affairs committee had found community sentences were currently falling “way short of their potential” for rehabilitating criminals.
He said that at present such punishments failed to tackle the causes of offending such as drugs, alcohol or mental ill health, while probation officers with “unmanageable” caseloads struggled to supervise offenders in the community.
Judges and magistrates felt they could not trust such ineffective punishments and had little option but to send offenders to prisons which were at breaking point and “fuelled” criminality rather than curing it before they were released, the report found. As a result, courts issued 69,941 community sentences in 2022, half as many as the 158,586 recorded in 2012.
Jails are 99 per cent full and this summer the prison service came close to running out of space, forcing the Government to announce a series of measures to reduce the numbers, including a new policy against sending offenders to jail for less than 12 months.
“Given the dire state of the criminal justice system more broadly, it is clearly time for a rethink,” said Lord Blunkett, who was home secretary from 2001 to
2004. He is understood to have discussed the proposals with Shabana Mahmood, the shadow justice secretary and a close ally of Sir Keir Starmer. She and the Labour leader are drawing up plans on how the party will tackle the prison overcrowding crisis.
Labour sources said the party was likely to adopt the Government’s short sentencing plans, adding that there was
“little to disagree with” in Lord Blunkett’s and the committee’s proposals.
“[Community] sentences currently fall way short of their potential. But with the right investment, they have the capacity to succeed where short sentences fail,” said Lord Blunkett.
The Lords committee’ eight-month investigation found that reoffending rates could be slashed to a quarter of the current 23 per cent rate if criminals were given effective community sentences, where the root of their personal problems was treated.
However, official figures showed 38 per cent of offenders on probation – 91,000 people– had mental health problems but only 1,302, less than 1.5 per cent, received appropriate treatment.
Drug rehabilitation orders for offenders on probation also halved from 9,290 in 2012 to 3,601 in 2022.
Lord Blunkett warned the probation service had been left “fragmented” by its “flawed” privatisation.
It resulted in courts failing to get the pre-sentence reports they needed, a problem highlighted by scandals where violent offenders, such as the killer of teacher Zara Aleena, were wrongly released without proper supervision.
The prison population is projected to rise from 89,000 to 106,300 by March 2027 but plans to build 20,000 new places are behind schedule with two proposed new mega-jails currently blocked by planning objections.
Writing for The Telegraph, Lord Frost, the Tory peer, urged ministers to “get a grip” on the system. “Whether you think their job is incarceration or rehabilitation, they are doing it badly,” he wrote. “They don’t incarcerate effectively because they are full.”