Tories attack Ken Clarke over ‘soft’ prison stance

He cited inmates he met on his visit to Leeds Prison yesterday — one jailed for failing to keep up child support payments, another who had driven while disqualified, and a third an asylum seeker — as examples of the kind of offender better dealt with in the community rather than in a £30,000-a-year prison berth.

He suggested that stopping reoffending was a better measure of justice policy than how many people were jailed. The prison population has risen by two thirds since 1995, as more offenders were jailed and for longer sentences.

He proposed employing charities and private sector organisations to supervise community punishments such as unpaid work, with tagging, curfews and supervision, as a better alternative. And the supervisors could receive bonus payments on results if the criminals did not reoffend for two years, he told an audience at the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies at King’s College in London.

The speech represents a change from the “prison works” policy espoused by Michael Howard, Mr Clarke’s successor as Home Secretary from 1993-97.

Mr Davies was the first Tory backbencher to express his anger, saying he was “totally opposed” to jailing fewer offenders.

“Lots of Conservative supporters, whether they be in Parliament or members or voters, will feel very disappointed by this announcement,” Mr Davies told the BBC.

“Disappointed because I think lots of them will feel that it’s the wrong thing to do but also disappointed because many of them voted for the Conservative Party at the last election on the basis that we would send more people to prison, not fewer.

“Why can people not be rehabilitated in prison? And, given that the longer people spend in prison the less likely they are to offend, it seems to me that prison, if people are there for long enough, can actually make a big difference.”

Mr Cameron today stood by his Justice Secretary, telling Prime Minister’s Questions in the House of Commons that prison was poor value for money in many cases. Replying to Labour MP Gerald Howarth, he said: “I think prison can work, but it is just not working at the moment.

“When we have got these high reoffending rates, the appalling cost of a prison place and the problems of drugs in prison (then something has to change). Just defending the status quo, as Labour is doing, is a grave mistake. If ever there was a part of the public sector that needed to reform to make sure that prison does work, then this is it.”

Mr Clarke acknowledged that Britain’s budget deficit had forced him to cut the cost of justice, but tried to make a virtue of necessity. “Necessary financial stringency” could be turned into an “effective new policy direction”, he told BBC One’s Breakfast.

“Many a man has gone into prison without a drug problem and come out drug-dependent,” said Mr Clarke.

“Just banging up more and more people for longer without actively seeking to change them is what you would expect of Victorian England.”

He told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that he had been “quite astonished” by the doubling in prisoner numbers and the huge growth in size and budget of the Home Office since he was Home Secretary in 1992–93.

He blamed Labour for doubling the size of the prison population without questioning whether it was the right thing to do.

“David Blunkett and Jack Straw had a chequebook in one hand and a copy of the Daily Mail in the other,” he said.

Mr Straw has already hit back, in an article in the Daily Mail, in which he accuses Mr Clarke of a “hand-wringing” approach to crime that was out of touch with the public, and at odds with the Prime Minister.

“David Cameron hit the nail on the head during the pre-election televised leadership debates when he said there was one pledge in Nick Clegg’s manifesto ‘which worried me a lot’,” Mr Straw writes.

“He explained: ‘My mother was a magistrate in Newbury for 30 years. She sat on the bench and she did use those short sentences you’re talking about.

“’I’ve got to tell you , when someone smashes up the bus stop, when someone repeatedly breaks the law, when someone is found fighting on a Friday or Saturday night, as a magistrate, you’ve got to have that power for a short prison sentence when you’ve tried the other remedies’.”

Grassroots Tories on the Conservative Home website have also criticised Mr Clarke’s plans.

“This is weak and will push up crime, it’s as simple as that. The Tory party is clearly no longer the law and order party,” writes JCS.

Vulture comments: “Clarke is as wrong about this as he is about the EU. Such liberal policies will please the beardie weirdie Lib Dems, but have no place in what is still supposed to be a Conservative-led Government.

“Softness on crime has already significantly degraded our country and more of it would speed us further and faster down the road to perdition. Clarke is too old, too fat, and too soft to be a minister. Time he was put out to grass.”

Mr Clarke claimed that he remained fully in accord with Mr Cameron. “Some people require short sentences. I think there is a case that the recidivist antisocial person, that’s the kind of thing that all this increase in the prison population hasn’t done much about,” he told Today.

Not all the Tory reaction to Mr Clarke’s proposals was negative. Andrew wrote on Conservative Home: “This liberal Conservative is delighted with Ken Clarke’s speech. Prison works, but only as a shock change to the system. it is not the holy grail that some seem to treat it as. Statistics have shown time and time again that prison is not the solution we hoped it could be.”