Judicial Scorecards

Philip Hollobone Excerpts

Wednesday 7th September 2011 Westminster Hall

[Mr Philip Hollobone (Kettering) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Bone; I thank Mr Speaker for granting me permission to hold this debate this morning; and I welcome the Under-Secretary of State for Justice, the hon. Member for Reigate (Mr Blunt), to his seat, from which he will listen to and respond to this debate on an issue that I want to raise not only on my own behalf but most importantly on behalf of my constituents.

That issue is what I have called judicial scorecards. The idea is that each judge and magistrate should be presented with an annual report of those people who have appeared before them and who have been sentenced by them, including details of any reoffending that has taken place since sentencing. Every year, each judge and magistrate would be given a simple and straightforward report that would detail the names of the defendants who have appeared before them, the crimes of which those defendants were accused and the sentence that was imposed, compared with the sentence that could have been imposed under the maximum terms set out in the relevant legislation. The report would also include details of any subsequent reoffending, not only for the crime for which the defendants appeared before the judge or magistrate but for other crimes that the defendants may have committed.

There is a fundamental gap in our criminal justice system. Judges and magistrates do their best, but as far as I can tell they never actually know what happens to those defendants whom they sentence. Judges and magistrates arrive at their sentencing decision, having taken into account the guidelines produced by the Sentencing Council; using their best opinion, they arrive at a decision as to what is the most appropriate sentence and that sentence is then imposed; but they never know subsequently whether or not that sentence was effective.

The same is true for police officers. I declare an interest as a special constable with the British Transport police. I often talk to police officers about the arrests they have made and I ask, “Oh, what happened to Joe Smith, whom you arrested for fare evasion?”, or, “What happened to Joe Bloggs, whom you arrested for burglary?” The officer will reply, “Oh, I don’t know.” I ask, “Do you have any idea what sentence he was awarded?” They reply, “No, I don’t know. My job was done. I arrested the offender and he was presented before the courts, or otherwise.” It is a great shame that police officers do not know that information; they are not informed about what happens to the people they arrest. The same is true for the judiciary, regarding the people they sentence.

Our criminal justice system would be improved if judges and magistrates knew more about what happened to the people they sentence. At one level, that is a very human thing. We are dealing with individuals who have broken the law and the judges and magistrates are doing their best to impose the correct sentence, but unless they are updated on whether or not that sentence was effective there will continue to be a big gap in our criminal justice system.

Mr Bone, you will know that 10% of criminals commit 50% of the crime in this country. You, I, the Minister and everyone in this House, as well as all of our constituents, are really concerned about the high reoffending rates in this country. When I asked the Minister about reoffending on 11 January, he provided some very helpful statistics to the House. I asked him:

“What the reoffending rates were for those sentenced to jail terms of (a) one year, (b) five years and (c) 10 years in the latest period for which figures are available”.

He helpfully replied:

“In 2008, the rate of reconviction within one year for adults discharged from custody after a sentence of less than a year was 61.1%; it was 31.0% for those given sentences of one to five years; 17.5% for offenders given sentences of five to 10 years, and 6.4% for 10 years or more.”

I then asked:

“Does the Minister agree that…the longer prisoners spend in prison the greater the chance of ensuring their effective rehabilitation before being released?”

He replied:

“We have to ensure that longer sentences are given to recidivist offenders and that we effectively rehabilitate people and break the cycle of crime through the proposals that we have presented in the Green Paper to drive that number down.”—[Official Report, 11 January 2011; Vol. 521, c. 147.]

I absolutely agree with that—we have to get those reoffending rates down. The Minister and I are in complete agreement that when 10% of criminals are committing 50% of the crime, those recidivist offenders must receive longer sentences, and yet, as we all know, the problem, again and again, is that those recidivist offenders are not being given the stiff sentences early enough in their criminal careers to deter them from a life of crime. Part of the reason why I am so enthusiastic about the idea of judicial scorecards is that they would help to alert judges and magistrates at an early stage in a criminal’s career that the criminal was not being given a sentence that was stiff enough.

I raised the proposal for judicial scorecards on the Floor of the House with the Minister’s boss, the Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice, on 28 June. I asked him:

“If he will take steps to ensure that judges and magistrates are informed of incidents of reoffending of each offender they have sentenced”.

He replied:

“We have begun work to improve access to local criminal justice statistics. For example, criminal justice and sentencing statistics are now broken down to court level and are available online. In terms of individuals, pre-sentence reports provide the court with details of a defendant’s offending history and compliance with any previous sentences.”

I then said:

“Although it is important to have judicial independence, surely it is not beyond the wit of the Department that each judge and each magistrate should be given an annual report card on the effectiveness of their sentencing decisions. If they have given out a string of sentences and the convicts have reoffended regularly, that judge or magistrate will know that something is wrong with their approach.”

He replied:

“As I said, we have begun work, and that is certainly an interesting suggestion. A massive amount of data would be involved in providing every judge and magistrate with full information about everybody they had ever sentenced”. —[Official Report, 28 June 2011; Vol. 530, c. 738.]

I was pleased that the Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice saw this idea of judicial scorecards as an “interesting” approach, but it sounds to me from his responses in June that the Ministry of Justice is already making some progress towards them. If statistics are being

“broken down to court level and are available online”,

we are going in the right direction, and I do not believe that it would necessarily involve a massive amount of data to tie up an offender’s criminal history with the judge or magistrate before whom they appeared. It would help to make the criminal justice system far more effective. At the end of the day, what my constituents want is judges and magistrates to award sentences that are effective in preventing reoffending. Introducing more transparency into the system to reveal whether judges and magistrates are awarding such sentences would assist the judges and magistrate themselves, and help to improve the effectiveness of our criminal justice system.

In the exchange on the Floor of the House that I mentioned earlier, another Member asked:

“There is considerable evidence that judges do not know enough about what happens once they sentence prisoners and those sentences have been disposed of. Will the Justice Secretary do what he can to increase the experience obtained by judges of those disposals and will he ask the Sentencing Council to advise, with a particular focus on what works in preventing offending and reoffending?”

The Justice Secretary replied:

“The Sentencing Council is already under a duty to provide information about the effectiveness of sentencing practice”.—[Official Report, 28 June 2011; Vol. 530, c. 738.]

It seems to me, however, that that duty to provide information about the effectiveness of sentencing practice is not specific enough to the individual judges and magistrates making the decisions. We do not have that far to go from the collection of statistics at a court level to doing it on an individual level for each judge and magistrate.

That is not to criticise judges and magistrates; it is to help them. We know that every time we stand up and speak in this place, and every time we vote, information is recorded for every member of the public to access online, to see whether we are turning up and representing constituents’ concerns. Every time a premier league footballer kicks a ball, the data are recorded and a scorecard is produced of his effectiveness throughout the season. I believe that the information is there in the court process, and it could be distilled in a simplified way in an annual report card, helping to inform judges and magistrates about whether they are making the right decisions.

Evidence about this sort of thing was presented to the Select Committee on Justice in 2009-10, and included in its January 2010 report entitled “Cutting crime: the case for justice reinvestment”. Michael Marcus, a circuit court judge from Portland, Oregon, presented evidence to the Committee about how this sort of approach can help the judicial system to be more effective because of the awarding of correct sentences. With yesterday’s welcome announcement from the Ministry of Justice about the introduction of television into courts, it seems that the Department is receptive to making our criminal justice system more transparent.

The Justice Minister will know, as will you, Mr Bone, that many of our constituents do not have the confidence they ought to have in our criminal justice system, because some of the sentencing decisions are not consistent. We have the recent example of the riots in London and other metropolitan areas in August, when the clerks to the magistrates seemed to be saying, “You don’t have to adhere to the guidelines that have been issued by the Sentencing Council; make the riots a special case.” My constituents would say, “The stiff sentences awarded to rioters should be the same as the stiff sentences awarded to everyone, not just in August 2011 but all the time.” There should be consistency in sentencing, and the judicial scorecard approach would help.

It comes down to the number of people we sentence to prison terms, and I think that my constituents’ view is that not enough criminals go to jail. There seems to be a myth in this country that we have too many people in prison, but I contest that that is absolutely not the case. If we look at the percentage of prisoners per 100,000 people, we are pretty near the global average, but if we look at the number of prisoners in relation to the number of crimes committed we do not have the highest prison population in the western world; we have the lowest. On that measure, compared with the United States, 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 about 13 prisoners, compared with about 15 in Canada and Australia, considerably more than 20 for the EU as a whole, and a whopping 166 in the United States. 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 —the United States—has the lowest crime rate, with 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 as a whole has the second highest prison rate and the second lowest crime rate. In my view, those are not coincidences.

The purpose of today’s debate is to be helpful to Her Majesty’s Government. I have come here with a constructive suggestion to make our judicial system more transparent. I thank judges and magistrates for the work that they do on behalf of us all, but they need assistance in the form of information about how effective their well-meaning sentencing decisions are. My constituents would like to see stiffer justice; they would like to see recidivist offenders put behind bars for longer, not only as a punishment but to aid their rehabilitation. I know that the Justice Minister is very sympathetic to that view because he has said so to the House. A judicial scorecard system need not be complex; it could be very simple and straightforward. Presenting each judge and each magistrate with an annual report about the effectiveness of their sentencing decisions would be a good thing for the criminal justice system in this country.