Khalid Mahmood
Main Page: Khalid Mahmood (Labour - Birmingham, Perry Barr)Department Debates - View all Khalid Mahmood's debates with the Ministry of Justice
(5 years, 8 months ago)
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Rory Stewart
There is an issue here of correlation and causation. It is true that people who serve 40 or 50-year sentences are less likely to reoffend, for two reasons. The first relates to the offence type. For example, murderers are generally less likely to reoffend than shoplifters. Secondly, the mere fact that they are locked away for 40 or 50 years makes it difficult for them to reoffend. Generally, short-sentence prisoners who are in for under 12 months are overwhelmingly dominated by chaotic individuals who often have drug or alcohol problems and who often commit offences such as shoplifting. They are a much more difficult target group to deal with than the people who are locked away for 40 or 50 years.
Mr Khalid Mahmood (Birmingham, Perry Barr) (Lab)
After the failure of Working Links and in the light of the National Audit Office’s damning report into the implementation of Transforming Rehabilitation the first time round by the former Secretary of State—who was then promoted to the Department for Transport, proving that Conservative rehabilitation does not work—as well as continual criticism by Her Majesty’s inspectorate of prisons proving that the mixed system is not beneficial to the taxpayer, why is the Minister continuing with the TR2 programme?
Rory Stewart
The first thing is to absolutely reassure the hon. Gentleman that we are looking very carefully at the responses to the consultation and listening carefully to what is being said around the House. Our response will address many of his fundamental concerns. We should see a better resourced, more unified and higherquality probation system at the end of this.