First thoughts on the sentencing green paper
So here it is, the long awaited green paper on sentencing and rehabilitation from the Ministry of Justice.
There will be plenty of time to pick over its contents and there is much to both welcome and be wary of. The undoubted thrust of the green paper, however, is to see a reduction in the prison population and if done properly that can only be a good thing.
Speaking personally, I was pleased to see Ken Clarke citing Canada in interviews, given what I’ve written previously about that country’s experience of decarceration in the 1990s.
What seems clear already is that this green paper is the product of a classic tussle between Whitehall entities, with the poor old Ministry of Justice playing something of a piggy in the middle. On the one side, there was Number 10 and the Prime Minister’s desire to minimise the bad publicity that would come from abandoning Conservative manifesto pledges to introduce min/max sentencing and mandatory prison sentences for knife possession. The hand of Downing Street is most obvious in the stepping back from any definitive action to limit the use of short sentences and in the lack of any proposal to abolish the indeterminate sentence for public protection (although the sentence will be limited from its current scope).
On the other side, there stands the Treasury and its steadfast demand to see budget cuts. Rumours swirled over the last week that the Ministry of Justice was seeking a commitment from the Treasury to receive rebates if the department was to fail to cut the prison population and in fact see numbers rise. The fact the Treasury resisted this overture has almost certainly ensured the fragile reform agenda will survive to fight another day.
Filed under: crime, government, politics, prison, probation | 3 Comments
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As I understand it, the theory is that by reducing the prison population by an estimated 3,000 (an estimate, not a target) and dealing with them much more cheaply in the community (including in drug dependency units, alcohol abuse clinics, and mental health establishments, as well as punishments in the form of obligatory community work), money that would otherwise have been spent on keeping those concerned in prison will be freed to pay for improvements to and expansion of treatment and punishment in the community. This aspiration seems reasonably plausible.
The provisions of the Green Paper on IPPs (indeterminate sentences for public protection), if confirmed and implemented following the 12-week consultation period, should both reduce to a trickle of genuinely major offences (principally violent and sex crimes) the number of IPPs awarded and force parole boards to release all but the most obviously dangerous IPP offenders when they have served their tariffs. I would have preferred IPPs to be abolished outright, but I recognise that that would have been politically impossible. The Green Paper changes seem to me the next best thing: once they are in place (if they survive the assaults of the tabloids and the Tory press) I expect that IPPs will in practice merge imperceptibly into life sentences. I have posted more detailed analyses of the Green Paper’s proposals on IPPs on my blog at http://www.barder.com/3013, with a revised version on LabourList at http://www.labourlist.org/ken-clarkes-proposals-on-ipps-deserve-a-heartfelt-welcome. Comments on either will be very welcome.
I hope the Howard League, Liberty, Justice, the Prison Reform Trust and everyone else who wants IPPs, as a vicious and deeply flawed régime of preventive detention, radically reformed, will strongly support the proposals on IPPs in the Green Paper, whether or not they have reservations about other things in the Green Paper, or worries about the funding implications of some of Ken Clarke’s other plans.
Brian Barder
http://www.barder.com/ephems/
Brian, thank you for commenting and I saw your LabourList piece earlier.
The Howard League will certainly welcome the proposals on the IPP, and much else in the green paper.
It would have been nice to see the sentence abolished but as you say politically very difficult. This is certainly the next best thing, and does go further than we thought possible at one point.
I think Clarke’s performance in the House in particular was impressive. If you wanted any one person to be leading this agenda through parliamentary debate it would definitely be Ken!
I am glad of the proposals in the green paper on ipp sentences as its terrible to keep people locked up this way . Ihave a son on a 3 yrs ipp and cant focus on the future theres no date to work towards and welcome this change