Contrary to liberal misconceptions, crime is not an illness to be treated; it is the cruel, chosen pursuit of individuals who damage other people’s lives and livelihoods. Victims must never be allowed to become statistics, merely plotted on a graph, for any of us may become subject to someone else’s careless greed or heartless malice. Straightforwardly, the public want justice to prevail.
So, when the people here in Lincolnshire and elsewhere hear of a criminal sentence for a terrible crime, they assume that people will serve all of it. However, it was revealed last week that the new Government intends to release prisoners – including some who, through disorder, have hurt others – after serving 40% of their sentence.
A sense that justice is done is essential to maintaining popular faith in the judicial response to crime. We know that prison works – simply because imprisoning someone takes them away from the crime they committed and stops them from committing others. Yet, too many of those with power have lost sight of the principle aim of criminal justice – that law breakers will suffer appropriate punishment, including the deprivation of their liberty.
Prison overcrowding is being used as an excuse for this Government’s early release policy. I have repeatedly warned Ministers of the consequences of building too few new prisons, and although under the Conservatives, 5,700 extra prison places were added, plainly, that was not enough.
Disturbingly, the new Prisons Minister has made clear that misguided misassumptions also play a part in justifying the outrage of early release. He is on the record as saying:
“We’re addicted to sentencing, we’re addicted to punishment. So many people who are in prison, in my view, shouldn’t be there.”
This contradicts what most people think. As the Victims Commissioner Claire Waxman recently declared: “The justice system in this country is officially broken if Judges are now told not to jail convicted criminals as prisons are full.” If we are serious about protecting the public, tough justice is crucial – for it is kind and genuine people are so often those who are bullied and humiliated by the cruel and heartless. We now have such overcrowded prisons that convicted criminals whose crimes meant incarceration are soon to be spared.
As a Minister, I worked on prison education because as we try to ensure that people who have committed a crime do not commit another, evidence shows those of them that have gained the skills to get and keep a job are more likely to ‘go straight’. Nevertheless, rehabilitation cannot be the only – nor the defining – characteristic of criminal justice. As Philip Bean, the criminologist under whom I studied in the 1980s, recognised: a justly retributive response to criminal malevolence is necessary, not only because it is the right thing to do, but crucially because it is the element of criminal justice which maintains the public’s faith that what’s justly appropriate will be done and be seen to be done. In essence, the principal objective of the criminal justice system must be retribution.
There are better ways of dealing with prison overcrowding and recidivism, as I pointed out in Parliament before voting against the early release of prisoners. There is, of course, a case for rehabilitation, both because each reformed felon is a soul saved and because fewer repeat offenders means fewer victims. Nevertheless, the most straightforward way of preventing those who have been involved in a crime from committing more is to end early releases altogether, keeping wrongdoers out of the way of those they might otherwise harm.
Yet, there remains a still better way of tackling overcrowded prisons. Foreign nationals, who have committed crimes in our country and consequently been sent to jail, represent one in eight of our current prison population; costing taxpayers £500 million a year.
Those who have come here from abroad, only to break the law, have no place in our prisons and no place in our nation – they should be sent back to their own countries.
