David Cameron upsets prison reformers with sentencing crackdown

Kenneth Clarke’s prison plans dashed by PM’s call for tougher sentencing for violent and sexual offences and knife crime David Cameron has announced plans to impose a surprise tough “two strikes and you’re out” mandatory life sentence in a move that looks set to dash justice secretary Kenneth Clarke’s hopes of stabilising the record 85,000 prison population in England and Wales. Cameron announced hardline plans for serious violent and sex offenders to spend longer in jail and an automatic six-month jail term for “aggravated knife possession”. Prison reformers warned that the plans risked fuelling a fresh rise in what are already record jail numbers. Whitehall sources conceded that Cameron’s fresh “tough on crime” rhetoric was now likely to derail the justice secretary’s liberal “rehabilitation revolution”, as well as force Clarke to look elsewhere for £130m further savings in his department. The publication of Clarke’s legal aid, sentencing and punishment of offenders bill showed that the justice secretary had been forced by Downing Street to ditch more than 60% of his original proposals. These included the wholesale abandonment of his original plan for a maximum 50% discount for early guilty pleas – described by the prime minister as “too lenient” – which would have provided 3,400 of the estimated 6,450 prison places to be saved. Cameron said this proposal would have “sent the wrong message” if it had gone ahead, adding that restoring public confidence in the criminal justice system was the public’s only test. At a rare No 10 press conference, he fended off suggestions that his government was looking weak due to repeated policy U-turns. He argued that a willingness to listen and change policy was a sign of strength, an assertion backed by Downing Street’s own polling. Cameron went out of his way to praise Clarke’s stewardship of the Ministry of Justice and Clarke brushed aside questions about his future, saying: “I have been on probation for the last few decades, and I am just about getting the hang of it.” The justice secretary has also quietly dropped his original plan to restore the discretion of judges on sentencing by scrapping David Blunkett’s 2003 minimum mandatory sentences of 15 years, 30 years and “whole life” for the most serious murders. A Ministry of Justice (MoJ) impact assessment estimates the redrawn sentencing package will save just 2,650 prison places each year – or £80m – compared with the original 6,450 and £210m saving. MoJ officials said that proposals in the bill would have a “broadly neutral” impact on the prison population by 2014/15 as it is already projected to rise by a further 3,000 by then. But that fails to take account of the tougher punishments unveiled by Cameron, most of which are not contained in the new bill. The MoJ said that it had no estimate as yet for the tougher extra measures to be added to the bill this autumn but penal reformers said they were bound to boost prison numbers. They include the resurrection of Michael Howard’s 1996 “two strikes and you’re out” mandatory life sentence for the most serious repeat offenders, and a proposal to delay the earliest release date for 6,500 serious sexual and violent offenders from halfway until two-thirds of the way through their sentence. The government has also postponed its immediate plans to revise the release test for 6,000 prisoners on the indeterminate sentence for public protection (IPP). Instead an “urgent review” will now be undertaken to replace the current IPP regime with “a much tougher determinate sentencing framework with a greater number of life sentences”. This will report in the autumn and include the new mandatory life sentence for repeat serious offenders. The plan to introduce a mandatory six-month sentence for threatening someone with a knife is already in the legislation. The impact assessment says the move will need 100 extra prison places, at a cost of £5m a year. The prime minister failed to honour a deal that Clarke has struck with the Treasury that it would make up most of the difference if savings were not realised as result of a change of government policy. Instead the justice secretary will have to find the “missing” £130m from his own budget over the next four years. He denied that the probation service budget, which has been protected so far from 23% cuts, would be a particular target, but said it was not yet making the same level of savings as was being required of the police. Frances Crook, director of the Howard League for Penal Reform, described the new mandatory sentences on knives and repeat offenders as “worrying” saying they would compromise judicial discretion. “Given around 5,000 people are convicted of carrying knives each quarter, what constitutes using a knife to threaten will have to be very tightly defined to avoid prison numbers spiralling out of control,” she said. The shadow justice secretary, Sadiq Khan, said the government’s policies on law and order were “in complete shambles”. But the former Tory home secretary Lord Howard said the government had taken a “perfectly sensible” approach. Prisons and probation UK criminal justice Sentencing David Cameron Kenneth Clarke Conservatives Alan Travis Patrick Wintour guardian.co.uk

Posted by on June 21, 2011. Filed under News, Politics, World News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.