It was interesting to see Ken Clarke as Justice Secretary saying that we lock up too many people and vowing to cut the number of people in prison.
Had he ‘gone soft’ as Michael Howard predictably jumped in to say? Well Ken has never been a soft politician. One reason that he never became Leader of the Conservative Party is his tendency to tell it as he see it and he’s never knowingly missed the chance of a fight. On this occasion – and its not always been the case with his decisions – he’s simply following the evidence. Short prison sentences do not work. Long sentences – when correctly applied – remove dangerous people from circulation.
Prisons also give time for education and training and other positive interventions, although those beneficial activities can’t happen if prisons are overcrowded and if the staff and facilities aren’t available. If short sentences are to be avoided community sentences need to be effective and properly resourced, and the public need to know that they are effective in cutting reoffending. That is a victim-centred approach, because as Victim Support told the Justice Select Committee, what victims of crime want most, apart from not to have been a victim in the first place is not to be a victim again. That is why I am pleased that Ministers supported the Justice Select Committee’s work on Justice Reinvestment.
Every crime is one too many but an intelligent society bases its crime policy on what works, and that is what we should do. As a newly elected member of the Home Affairs Select Committee I shall be pressing for that to be the case in England and Wales.