Clarke promises ‘radical’ prison reforms
By Alex Stevenson and Peter Wozniak
Ken Clarke has unveiled what he calls a “radically different approach” to criminal justice, amid Tory disquiet about his liberal approach.
A sentencing and rehabilitation green paper outlining the justice secretary’s plans contains plans to reduce the number of short sentences, cutting the overall prison population by an estimated 3,000.
More prisoners will face regular working hours, tougher curfew requirements will be used more and more offenders will directly compensate crime victims under the propose changes.
A handful of prisons are already trialling private sector-led ‘payment by results’ schemes, with companies set the goal of cutting reoffending rates.
Mr Clarke said he intended to apply the principles of this approach “across the whole system” by 2015.
Shadow justice secretary Sadiq Khan called the government’s plan “a bluff on crime and a bluff on the causes of crime”, in a play on Tony Blair’s famous soundbite.
“I regard prison first and foremost as a place of punishment where people lose their liberty as a place of reparation for what they have done,” Mr Clarke told MPs.
“But on top of that prisons can’t be just an expensive way of giving communities a break.”
Earning the ire of many within his own party, Mr Clarke has championed moves to reduce the reliance on short sentencing arrangements which are argued to be ineffective.
“We’ve got to stop having this revolving door where people go into prison, come out and within less than a year half of them have committed more crime,” he told the Today programme earlier.
“Prison’s there to punish people. When they’ve finished their punishment, the public interest demands we do far more than we do at the moment to make sure they don’t start offending again.”
Mr Clarke said he wanted to avoid the growth of a “criminal underclass” by stopping the “remorseless rise” in the prison population seen in the last 15 years.
Britain’s prisons now hold around 85,000 inmates. Mr Clarke’s moves, concentrating on cutting the number of short sentences, would see this reduced to around 82,000.
Reducing rates of re-offending and introducing schemes to better reintroduce convicted criminals into work and society have been made critical targets by the coalition government.
Policies such as bringing in private sector companies to provide work to prisoners in a payment-by-results plan have also been mooted to be part of the government’s wide-ranging reforms.
Key figures in the previous government, including Jack Straw and current shadow chancellor Alan Johnson, have accused the government of being ‘soft on crime’, although party leader Ed Miliband supports the move.
Mr Khan commented: “A sentencing review that should have been about reducing re-offending and protecting the public seems to have become just an exercise in cutting costs.
“Sadly, despite Cameron’s rhetoric about putting the public first, the government have retreated to a traditionally Tory ideological approach, setting an arbitrary target for the prison population, rather than addressing the primary concern of protecting the public.”
He defended Labour’s record by rejecting Mr Clarke’s claim that there is no link between prison numbers and overall crime levels.
“Under Labour, more serious and persistent criminals went to prison for longer and crime fell,” Mr Khan argued.
“The relationship between these two things may not have been simple and straightforward… but there was a relationship.”
Mr Clarke’s liberal approach has not been received with universal acclaim on the Tory benches, but the presence of Liberal Democrats in government has granted the justice secretary some leeway in pushing for his programme of changes.
Conservative MPs are especially concerned about Mr Clarke’s apparent move to drop a manifesto pledge that anyone convicted of a knife crime would go to prison.
The justice secretary insisted this morning that “people who are guilty of serious knife crimes will get serious prison sentences”, but added: “We’re not setting out absolute tariffs.”
