Victims of crime being ‘misled’ over length of prison sentences

VICTIMS of crime are being misled by prison sentences, the former lord chief justice of England and Wales has said.

Lord Thomas of Cwmgiedd, the head of the judiciary from 2013 to 2017, called for “critical” reform of the advice given to victims by police and the Crown Prosecution Service on how long perpetrators will spend in prison.

The current lack of clarity leaves victims feeling “fed up” when they later find out that an offender is to be automatically released halfway through their sentence, he said.

His comments come after Baroness Newlove, the victims’ commissioner, expressed concern that victims were losing confidence in the criminal justice system by being left in the dark over the way most criminals spend only half of their sentence in custody.

“There is a need for reform. It is absolutely critical,” Lord Thomas told The Daily Telegraph. “It is awful that a victim feels that someone has had a sentence of four years and doesn’t appreciate that they might be released from custody half way.

“I can see why they get fed up. I think the victims’ commissioner is quite right. It is a reluctance to engage in spelling out the truth of sentencing.”

Lord Thomas said that the current language used in a judge’s sentencing remarks “is not explicit enough” and should be translated into the “everyday language that people speak”.

“It is apparent that communicating between A and B is not working, so we need to ask ourselves why it isn’t working, address the problem and put it right,” he added.

Introduced in 2005 by Tony Blair’s government, automatic release permits offenders serving a determinate sentence to spend half of their sentence in prison before being released to spend the other half on licence.

The policy has been misunderstood by the public “for a considerable period of time,” Lord Thomas said, as he admitted that it had become a way of letting offenders “out of the back door” to reduce prison populations while appearing to give long sentences.

“The point of [automatic release] initially was that if we said to someone you need not serve the whole of the term in prison, that helped us to be able to say ‘behave properly and you might come out earlier’,” he said.

“But I regret to say it became a matter of managing the prison population – if you could keep sentences high but actually let them out the back door.”

Lord Thomas’s concerns were backed by Lord Phillips of Worth Matravers, who was lord chief justice from 2005 to 2008. “I suspect that not enough information is being given to victims. This is something that can be quite easily remedied,” he said.