Sentencing Review and Prison Capacity

Lord Harries of Pentregarth Excerpts

Wednesday 23rd October 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Timpson (Lab)]

The noble Lord will be pleased to know that a victims’ representative will be appointed to the panel. That is important because the voices of victims need to be heard and we will be announcing the appointment soon.

It is a very difficult situation for victims, especially with the recent releases. Often, they expected someone to be released but it happened a few days or weeks early. I believe that the victim contact scheme is important and works very well. We need to make sure that victims engage with it, where appropriate, because they do not in all cases. The latest SDS40 releases were far better managed. We had an eight-week lead-in time, which is not perfect but is better than the earlier ECSL scheme, which was pretty chaotic. It is important that this review considers the victims in every sentence and every line of the report.

[Lord Harries of Pentregarth (CB)]

My Lords, one of the most depressing points in the Minister’s Statement is that the prison population grows by around 4,500 prisoners a year. Do we really have to accept that it will continue to grow? The Statement says it is a matter of simple arithmetic, but have we lost sight of living in a predominantly law-abiding society, with crime cut down to the bare minimum?

[Lord Timpson (Lab)]

When I first walked into the Ministry of Justice and was told that the prison population goes up by 80 people a week, I thought that was manageable. But when you times that by 52, and then by five, you realise the scale of the problem. There are a number of examples of similar situations where people have done things differently. While we have a big problem on our hands, we need to make sure that it becomes a big opportunity to change things, because something is clearly not working.

I will give noble Lords the example of Texas, where they decided that a number of non-violent and first-time offenders would not go to prison but would serve community sentences instead—a number of other states have done similar things. I mentioned earlier that highly prolific low-level offenders actually went to prison for longer. Texas also introduced good-behaviour credits, an incentive scheme for people to behave in prison. Crime went down by 29% and 16 prisons have closed. So we should take hope from the fact that, if we use the evidence and take our time, we can learn from other examples. However, it will take time for the increase in prison numbers to slow down: these things, unfortunately, do not happen quickly enough.