Women Offenders and Older Prisoners
Debate between Lord Beith and David Nuttall(10 years, 9 months ago)
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Mr David Nuttall (Bury North) (Con)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship this afternoon, Mr Amess, and to follow the hon. Member for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell), who has posed a number of questions to the Minister. I have no questions to pose, but I want to support the comments made earlier by my hon. Friend the Member for Shipley (Philip Davies) and to speak out on behalf of what might be called the man in the street’s approach to sentencing and crime.
In essence, I want to see men and women treated equally by our justice system. I see no reason why a woman, purely for being a woman, should receive a more lenient sentence or any more favourable treatment than a man. Despite everything that has been said, my hon. Friend has done the whole House a favour—as he has tried to do on previous occasions, to be fair—by establishing the actual facts. Too often the facts get lost amid all the rhetoric. We need to see the right sentence to reflect the nature of the crime.
Looking at this from the point of view of the victim of the crime, if my home has been burgled, it makes no difference to me whether it was burgled by a man or a woman. The home owner will expect the sentence to be the same for whomever it was who burgled the house, whether man or woman, because the effect on the victim of the crime is the same. We seem to be moving away from the idea in the old adage that the punishment must fit the crime, to a modern 21st-century idea that the punishment must fit the offender.
Sir Alan Beith
I draw the hon. Gentleman’s attention to the many victims who have come before the Justice Committee as witnesses. They have said that the thing uppermost in their mind was that no one else should have to suffer the offence that they had suffered. The most appropriate decision, therefore, is whichever sentence is least likely to lead to reoffending.
Mr Nuttall
I am sure that that is absolutely right: the first thought of any victims of crime would be that they do not want anyone else to suffer in the same way. That brings me to my next point.