Losing the streets

One issue the Government does not want coming to the fore in an election year is law and order. Apart from the economy and healthcare, crime is the biggest day-to-day concern for most voters. The Government’s difficulty is that the prison system is full and, as a result, custodial sentences of less than 12 months are effectively being abolished. Inevitably, this means there will be criminals in the community who might otherwise be behind bars.

This policy is predicated upon ensuring those offenders are punished through community orders, which need to be supervised by probation officers. Yet a report from the House of Lords justice and home affairs committee says this is simply not going to happen, because the alternatives to custody are underfunded and not strong enough.

Since judges and magistrates felt they could not trust such ineffective punishments, they had little option but to send offenders to prison, yet are now being told to avoid doing so. If more offenders are being given non-custodial sentences at a time when community punishments are inadequate, the consequences are obvious. Most crime is committed by a small number of offenders who at least are taken out of circulation if they are in prison.

The Ministry of Justice said the increased use of suspended sentences would “stop the merry-goround of reoffending”. But announcing a strategy and implementing it are two different things, and few in the criminal justice world have much confidence in this working. In the end, the people who suffer are the victims of offenders who should either have been in jail or subject to stringent probation terms and yet managed to evade both.