COUNTRY WILL RUN OUT OF PRISON SPACE AGAIN, WARNS DAVID GAUKE

Former Lord Chancellor David Gauke has said the country needs to focus on reducing reoffending amongst criminals rather than longer sentences.

Speaking on GB News, David Gauke said:

“I think it’s right that we are really focused on reducing crime. The challenge is that a policy of increasing sentencing isn’t necessarily the right way to reduce crime.
“There are some cases, particularly if we’re looking at short sentences, where a short time in prison will result in a higher re offending rate than being released and having a community sentence.
“What we’ve seen over the last 30 years is a huge increase in the prison population, it has essentially doubled over that time period. And that is not cheap.
“The average cost for a prison place is £51,000 pounds a year. The government has committed to spend £10 billion on building more prisons.
“And the difficulty with this is a pound spent on more prison places is a pound you can’t spend on something that will be more effective in terms of stopping reoffending. And that’s the challenge that we face.
“The interim report has looked at what’s happened over the last 30 years or so, and what we can see is a clear move towards longer sentences, but not enough focus on reducing reoffending.
“I accept that long sentences tend to be popular [with voters], but I think the most important thing for the electorate is doing everything we possibly can to reduce crime.
“We’ve seen early releases. The truth is that government had no choice but to do that, because we were about to run out of capacity. On current projections, we’re going to run out of capacity again.
“I don’t think we want to see emergency releases. What you have to do is ensure that your sentencing policy is consistent with your prison capacity and ensure that we spend money as effectively as possible to ensure that people don’t commit further crimes.
The public really wants to see those crimes come down. We want to see lower levels of crime. We want to see fewer victims.
“There are better ways in which we can spend resources than just endlessly building more prison places.
“I think one of the difficulties is that victims are let down if we’re forced into emergency releases. I think there is a case for being more transparent so that victims understand precisely what is going to happen.
“We need to make sure these make sure the victims are properly informed of what’s going on.
“The view of most victims is they want to see crime come down. I completely understand that if there’s a terrible crime that’s happened we must always lengthen the sentence. I completely understand the public attitude on that.
“We’ve got some quite tough choices as a country and the government is going to have to take some tough choices here. Money spent on building new prisons and maintaining those prisons is really expensive.
“I dodn’t see anyone watching call to say they want to pay more taxes because they want to fund the justice system.
“What you can do is rehabilitate. And there are some jurisdictions like Texas, for example; no one would accuse Texas of being a soft touch.
“They found that their prisons were full, then they took action to essentially reward good behaviour for prisoners who were on long sentences, who had committed serious crimes, but if they behaved, stuck by the prison rules, that they worked, they did the courses, that they will be released earlier.
“And crime in Texas has fallen substantially as well.
“It is worth looking at other places where this has happened, it’s worked, and it’s contributed towards reducing crime.”