There has been enough heat generated by the debate on sentencing to warm a small town through most of winter. But it would be a gloomy place, because there has been precious little light. Tony Blair and David Cameron demonstrated the darker arts at Question Time yesterday, trading selective “facts” with vigour and self-righteousness, but little regard for public illumination. The biceps-bared bout of arm wrestling between John Reid, the Home Secretary, and Lord Goldsmith, his Cabinet colleague and the Attorney-General, over the case of a single paedophile is similarly depressing and likely to undermine public confidence in the criminal justice system further.
While there are individual cases in which criminals receive Andrex-like treatment from the bench, the trends suggest otherwise. The average prison sentence passed in the Crown Court since 1994 has increased for all serious offences bar robbery, rising from 20.4 months to 27 months. There is an endless flow of figures. The number of life sentences has more than doubled. It is also telling that for every sentence the Court of Appeal increased in 2005 for being too lenient, it reduced 22 for being too severe. If there is a problem with lax judges, it starts at the top. The judges themselves have chosen to enter the political debate and should not be surprised to find that they are now the subject of the debate.
Perhaps it is the politicians that are being too soft? Mr Cameron certainly felt on solid ground when lambasting Mr Blair for allowing many prisoners out of jail halfway through their sentence. In the past, criminals tended to be released after two thirds of their sentence was served. Although many are now released earlier, they are supposedly supervised in the community for the whole of the rest of their sentence. This is nice theory, and could indeed lead to improved rehabilitation. But to work, it requires a sharp Probation Service on top of its game. We currently have one that is “not fit for purpose”.
Ministers have some plausible responses. The indeterminate sentences introduced by the Criminal Justice Act 2003 are designed to ensure that certain types of sexual and violent offenders who present a danger to the community will not be released until the Parole Board considers them safe, although a few have received parole. The Act also brought in a new class of short, sharp prison sentence, though that looks likely to be delayed because its introduction threatens to overwhelm already crowded jails. And most of the 53 “lifers” released after less than six years were freed under rules constructed, embarrassingly for the Tories, by Michael Howard.
The real issue is not about softness or toughness, but clarity. The public is understandably confused by a government that talks tough but lets offenders out of prison early and then loses them: ministers need to explain their policies and improve the results. People are understandably irked when senior judges sound loftily dis- connected from their lives: the judi- ciary retains its credibility only while attached to the real world. And people are understandably aghast that a government that goes to the trouble of listing 153 different violent offences as suitable for harsher sentencing also allows the most heinous paedophiles significantly reduced sentences for pleading guilty, even when they are caught red-handed. Enough political insults — it is time for results.