Now the whole question of how that judiciary deals with prison overcrowding will be the subject to a review to parliament this afternoon. Lord Carter will recommend the judges should take into account the number of prison places available when hunting down sentences. Under the proposals offenders normally given short custodial terms would only go to prison if there were enough space, but the conservatives say the government should be building more prison places not letting offenders escape jail as Katie Russell reports.
There is a problem at the heart of our criminal justice system. We are locking up too many people, proportionally the highest numbers in Western Europe and the justice isn’t wrong. 11,000 prisoners have been released earlier in the last five months as a coping strategy. Lord Carter
s review to be reported to parliament this afternoon is expected to recommend offenders who were normally given a short custodial sentences of less than 6 months to go to prison only if there is sufficient space. Great use of community sentences to ease overcrowding and limiting indeterminate prison sentences introduced four years ago. It’s also a suggestion that it will recommend building more prisons financed by selling off in the city jails to redevelopment.
It cost now almost 120,000 per place to build a new prison place. That probably would mean less investment in drug treatment, less mental health care, the things actually cuts crime. And just more and more of the same, I think the only thing that we will resolve from that is we will have armies ex-prisoners coming out of prison homeless jobless and ready to offend again.
Most controversial there will be the suggestion that sentence should be determined not by the crime but by how full of prisons are at a particular time. It’s an idea put forward five years ago by the then Lord Chief Justice Lord Wolf ignored by the government then. Since then overcrowding has got even worse. Last Friday the total number in jail in UK was 81 thousand, the vast majority held in prison the vast majority male. Back in 1993 the number was 41,600. By 2014 the projected prison population will reportedly be anywhere between 88,000 and almost 102,000.
The idea is gonna be base stone whether there is a prison place or not is undermining the justice system really and I think it will ruin public confidence. And if you got two people committing the same offense yet they are getting two totally different sentences just only exigencies of overcrowding. That can’t be right.
The government is expected to approve most of Lord Cater’s recommendations, although it’s will stress heavily that jail is still the only option for the violent and dangerous criminals.
