Justice not served

Having worked for 39 years in the criminal justice system (30 as a police officer, followed by nine as a lay magistrate), i never cease to be amazed at how politicians seek to re-invent the same wheel.

Justice Minister Rory Stewart must surely be aware that many of the short custodial sentences he proposes to replace with community penalties are themselves imposed for breaches of community punishment (and only after other enforcement methods have failed).

imprisonment is already the last resort. it is a sad fact of life (but a fact, nonetheless) that the only punishment criminals truly fear is custody; for them, anything else comes under the heading of ‘got off’.

On more than one occasion during my police career i heard convicted criminals use exactly that term to describe the community penalty they had just received.

What Mr Stewart seemingly fails to grasp is the reason why short custodial sentences don’t work. They fail not because they are custodial, but because they are short.

The suggestion that a reduction in the severity of punishment will have a greater deterrent effect is self-evidently nonsense.

a more coherent strategy would be to substitute, for all community penalties, a suspended sentence with an unpaid work requirement, accompanied by a directive that every breach must result in immediate activation of the suspended prison term.

This would ensure that the only people serving short custodial sentences were those who had effectively volunteered to go to prison by failing to carry out their unpaid work. Sentences should be determined not by Justice Ministers, but by those who administer justice.

NAme ANd AddReSS SuPPlIed.