Sentencing (Green Paper)

Peter Bone Excerpts

Tuesday 14th December 2010 Westminster Hall

[Mr Hollobone]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. The previous Government made an almighty mess of this. Even though I disagree with the main thrust of this Green Paper, I commend the coalition Government for taking an organised and proactive interest in trying to address this issue sensibly, which the previous Government did not do.

[Mr Peter Bone (Wellingborough) (Con)]

My hon. Friend has been extremely generous in giving way. The fact that four Members have already contributed to this debate from the Back Benches shows how important the issue is. Prison officers came to my surgery and said, “What we need, Mr Bone, is not these short sentences of a year. We put them on community service for a couple of occasions, but when they come back the third time, we should put them away for five years so that they can get the proper training and education that they need in prison.” What would my hon. Friend say to that?

[Mr Hollobone]

I would say that my hon. Friend is spot on. He has provided me with a helpful link to the next part of my speech which is about the length of sentences. In 2006, the Home Office report “Re-offending of adults” concluded that

“re-offending rates are lower among offenders discharged from a custodial sentence of at least a year (49 per cent.) than among those discharged from a shorter custodial sentence (70 per cent.)...This suggests that custodial sentences of at least a year are more effective in reducing re-offending.”

It is worth repeating those figures; prisoners with sentences of up to one year had a reoffending rate of 70%, while in the case of prisoners with sentences of more than two years the reoffending rate dropped to 49%. The report also showed that for people who had spent more than four years in prison, the reoffending rate was merely 35%. Looking at those figures, my constituents would say, “Well, that says to us that we need to put these nasty people behind bars for longer, so that they can be rehabilitated properly before being released and being at large again”.

I also want to address this myth that we have too many people in prison in this country. In terms of absolute numbers, yes, we have a relatively high prison population, but we are a relatively highly populated country. If we look at the number of prisoners that we have for every 100,000 people, we are nearer the average but still quite high. However, the only meaningful measure of the size of the prison population is how many prisoners there are in relation to the number of crimes committed. On that measure, I would suggest that the evidence is startling—we do not have the highest prison population in the western world, but the lowest. Compared with the US, Canada, Australia and the EU as a whole, the UK has the lowest prison population of all. For every 1,000 crimes committed in the UK, we have approximately 13 prisoners, compared with approximately 15 in Canada and Australia, well over 20 for the EU as a whole and a whopping 166 in the US.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Bone]

That is the very point that I wanted to address today. My constituency neighbours my hon. Friend’s and it contains Her Majesty’s Prison Wellingborough, which now appears to be under threat of closure. HMP Wellingborough is under market testing. However, the market testing has been abandoned or put back. HMP Wellingborough has gone from being a rather poor prison to being the best category C prison in the east midlands. Does my hon. Friend agree that we should not be considering closing that type of prison?

[Mr Hollobone]

I agree with my hon. Friend. However, prison conditions are far too luxurious. I think that it is 1,500 prisoners who have Sky TV in their cells. I have lots of constituents in Kettering who cannot afford Sky TV. It is a scandal that prisoners receive a bigger allowance for their daily meals than our troops in Afghanistan. In many cases, prison accommodation is too comfortable.

On the other hand, I accept that when a prison is overcrowded it makes rehabilitation more difficult and it is appropriate that we have the right number of cells for the prisoners whom we need to house. However, there must be a limit on the quality of the accommodation on which we are currently spending lots of money.

The other point that I wanted to draw to the House’s attention is the fact that the country with the lowest prison rate—the UK—has the highest crime rate. Is that a coincidence? I do not think so. We have more than 10,000 crimes for every 100,000 people. The country with the highest prison rate, which is the US, has the lowest crime rate; it has about 4,500 crimes for every 100,000 people. Canada, which is the country with the second lowest prison rate, has the second highest crime rate. The EU has the second highest prison rate and the second lowest crime rate. That is not a coincidence. My hon. Friend the Member for Shipley (Philip Davies) has done a lot of very good work in this House in highlighting these statistics, which I think blow apart this namby-pamby approach to having soft community sentences to tackle the behaviour of some very nasty people.