Reducing Short Sentences for Women and Petty Offenders: Willing the Means as Well as the End.

At his excellent Bill McWilliams Memorial Lecture in Cambridge yesterday, Professor Rob Canton invited us to consider the case of Rita, a defendant with a long record of theft offences - described indeed by the prosecutor as a professional thief. Rita is a victim too, seemingly trapped in a series of violent relationships with men, with a strong suggestion that she is relieved of her ill-gotten gains by her current partner.  Why Punish? was the lecture’s title and by the end, in respect of Rita and many people like her there seemed no convincing answer. Yes, her behaviour should have consequences but imprisonment, or even an alternative such as a curfew with electronic monitoring look wholly inappropriate in the context of her life.   

Almost all of yesterday’s audience will I imagine have been pleased to hear today’s announcement that the government want to see fewer women in prison for short sentences. There will be a welcome too for the Justice Secretary’s view that “Offenders are part of our society and we must take steps to understand and address the underlying causes of offending, if we are to improve the lives of victims and support offenders to turn their own lives around”.  There may even be cautious optimism that the policy of reducing short sentences should apply to male offenders too. Prison Minister Rory Stewart said as much to the Justice Committee yesterday.

Where there may be more scepticism is about the means to the end. The £5 million earmarked for “intensive residential support options” which will act as alternatives for women is clearly not enough. Much more of the funds originally set aside for the thankfully abandoned community prisons should be reinvested to provide more comprehensive coverage.

But there will also need to be measures to ensure courts make proper use of community based alternatives. The Female Offender Strategy is very weak on sentencing, promising only that the “MoJ will work with judges to develop our understanding of what more might be done to ensure that the particular risks and needs of female offenders are addressed effectively in the court, and to ensure that courts receive all necessary information to inform the sentencing process”.  

Extraordinarily there’s no mention of the Sentencing Council which makes Guidelines for courts. Lord Phillips, who chaired its predecessor body wishes he had prepared a comprehensive set of gender specific guidelines. The current Council should rectify his oversight.  As well, they will surely need to look again at their forthcoming guideline on sentencing for breach offences which could lead to more rather than fewer short sentences.  More fundamentally I’d like to see the law changed so that previous convictions do not automatically make offences more serious. That’s the only way of keeping petty persistent offenders the right side of the custody threshold. 

Will this be done? I have my doubts after Rory Stewart's puzzling remarks in Parliament yesterday. He told MP's he'd like the prison population to go down but it was time to be realistic and accept that was not going to happen because of lack of public support. Instead he's planning for a prison population of 93,000 by 2022. This is far in excess of the 88,000 currently projected - an estimate that doesn't take account of recent falls. 

Why did he say that? Maybe he know something we don't and some ugly sentencing reforms are in the pipeline for serious offences. Maybe he wants to persuade the Treasury to let him keep the prison building money to give some headroom in the system to eliminate overcrowding. This is a plan the Conservatives had before the 2010 election before the Crash intervened.  Or perhaps Stewart wanted a get-tough headline in advance of the women’s strategy today. The Daily Mail’s “Green Light for Criminals"  headline, based on his comments about short term prisoners, hasn’t obliged.

Either way Stewart shouldn't give up on reducing prison numbers. There are lots more things he could do than perhaps he realises. 

As for the Mail, as far back as the 1990s, its  editor Paul Dacre  said that on crime his paper's role was "to articulate the concern of its readers and thereby harden the response from the Tory administration". Dacre is going soon and his approach to criminal policy should follow him out of the door.