PLANS BY the Conservative/ Liberal Democrat coalition to send fewer people to prison and to hand out more community service sentences in the United Kingdom have created tensions within the Conservative Party. Tory MPs and their former leader Michael Howard have criticised justice secretary Kenneth Clarke’s plans.
Mr Clarke said he had been amazed to discover after his appointment to the cabinet that the prison population of England and Wales had doubled to more than 85,000 since he served as home secretary in the early 1990s.
“This is quite an astonishing number which I would have dismissed as an impossible and ridiculous prediction if it had been put to me as a forecast in 1992.”
The latest statistics show that almost half of all offenders are convicted again within a year of leaving jail. Mr Clarke said reoffending rates among the 60,000 prisoners given short sentences had reached 60 per cent and rising. “This does not surprise me. It is virtually impossible to do anything productive with offenders on short sentences. And many of them end up losing their jobs, their homes and their families during their short time inside.”
Calling for more efforts to reform prisoners and community sentencing, Mr Clarke said: “There are some nasty people who commit nasty offences. They must be punished, and communities protected. But just banging up more and more people [for longer] without actively seeking to change them is what you would expect of Victorian England.”
The justice secretary’s speech marks a clear departure from the Conservatives’ election manifesto, which pledged to cut the numbers being released early because Labour had “failed to build enough places” by increasing cell numbers “as necessary to stop it”.
Charities and private companies could be hired to rehabilitate offenders and paid only if they kept their charges out of jail, Mr Clarke told the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies at King’s College in London. They would also supervise offenders, who could be subjected to tagging and curfews while carrying out unpaid work in the community.
Labour seized on the change of heart, and on prime minister David Cameron saying during the election campaign, in reference to his mother’s 30 years of service as a magistrate: “I’ve got to tell you, when someone smashes up the bus stop, when someone repeatedly breaks the law, when someone is found fighting on a Friday or Saturday night, as a magistrate, you’ve got to have that power for a short prison sentence when you’ve tried the other remedies.”
Former Tory leader Lord Howard said Mr Clarke was wrong to believe that shorter sentences did not work, though he agreed with his criticisms about the lack of rehabilitation in prisons, which he blamed on Labour. The public was safer when “persistent serious offenders are put behind bars”, he said.
Conservative MP Philip Davies said: “Lots of Conservative supporters, whether they be in parliament or members or voters, will feel very disappointed. Disappointed because I think lots of them will feel that it’s the wrong thing to do, but also disappointed because many of them voted for the Conservative Party at the last election on the basis that we would send more people to prison, not fewer.”