Community Sentences (Justice and Home Affairs Committee Report)

Lord Paddick Excerpts

Friday 26th July 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Paddick (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I am another interloper, I am afraid.

Sometimes the planets do align. This is a very welcome report on community sentences, and a Minister who believes that too many people are imprisoned. In my experience of over 30 years in policing, the biggest problem with low-level crime recidivism is the disruptive nature of short-term prison sentences, particularly to employment, housing and family ties, to the extent that it can lead such prisoners becoming institutionalised and unable to survive outside prison. I worked at Holloway, in north London, as a police constable. I distinctly remember an older woman who, having left the local women’s prison, made her way to the nearest store and blatantly committed shoplifting, hoping to be swiftly returned to the security of the prison. The local magistrate granted her wish. Short sentences can encourage recidivism, and community sentences can encourage reform.

As my friends, the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee—who so expertly chaired the committee and whose report we are debating today—and the noble Baroness, Lady Ludford, have said, community sentences can be tailor-made, enabling those subject to them to maintain the links that are so important in preventing reoffending. I am sure the Minister will agree that, if at all possible, any sentence should have the aim of preventing reoffending through rehabilitation, rather than by incarceration.

Committees always have to be disciplined in their focus to make their inquiries manageable, and this committee understandably decided to concentrate on community orders specifically, rather than other forms of community sentence, such as restorative justice sentences. It is on this subject that I wish to speak briefly.

Later in my police career, I worked with Professor Larry Sherman, now the Metropolitan Police’s chief scientific officer, on a Home Office trial of restorative justice, including those involved in serious offences that led to custodial sentences. The greatest positive impact was on victims of crime voluntarily coming face to face with their assailant, where the offender became a real person, not some monster in the victim’s imagination. In a legal system where the defendant can refuse to participate in the process, and where people in wigs and gowns talk to each other about something that is going to be done to them without their direct involvement, for the offender too, engagement with the restorative justice process can make them realise that the victim is not just another faceless target but someone with friends and family, and feelings. It makes their offending real.

Restorative justice is most impactful when it is not followed by the brutalising effects of a prison sentence. When restorative justice leads to genuine remorse and empathy and a tough but positive community sentence, it keeps everything in the real world that the offender inhabits, something that can turn offenders’ lives around and make the victim’s experience less traumatic. I could not let this opportunity pass to attempt to ensure that restorative justice is on the Minister’s agenda.