My Lords, I do not intend to fall into a bit of disagreement with the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, with whom I worked happily in the Constitution Committee, but the present state of the law has not really solved the problem, has it? Very
large numbers of very short sentences are given, and the consequence is that prison places are used, costs ensue, and the least effective way of dealing with individuals seems to be the one that is chosen. If there is some way in which we can strengthen the presumption the sentencing guidelines already carry, that would be good. The amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Ponsonby, is a complicated alternative way of doing it, but it does appear that something needs to be done.
The argument often used for short sentences is that courts have a problem in dealing with persistent repeat offenders and persistent repeat breaches of conditions of community sentences. There is a popular myth that if offenders do not respond to other measures, a taste of prison will soon put them right. There is absolutely no evidence to support this principle. Indeed, all the evidence points the other way.
I used to chair the Justice Committee in the House of Commons, and that has had a continuing interest in this problem. Its report in 2018 recommended that the Government introduce a presumption against short prison sentences. The Government welcomed this and said they were exploring options. In a follow-up report, the Justice Committee noted the Government’s stated intentions to move away from short custodial sentences.
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In 2019 the Ministry of Justice published an analysis which included the assertion that
“sentencing offenders to short term custody with supervision on release was associated with higher proven reoffending than if they had instead received community orders and/or suspended sentence orders”.
The relevance of a suspended sentence among the range of possibilities should be remembered. When David Gauke, who has been mentioned, was Lord Chancellor, he seemed quite strongly to support this direction of policy and referred to the large reduction in prison places which could be achieved by it. Robert Buckland was more reluctant. When he was in front of the Justice Committee, he referred to his experience as a recorder, which told him that there were times when short prison sentences should be available to judges and magistrates for repeat offenders who failed to comply with community orders.
Of course, the noble Lord, Lord Dubs, and I are not arguing that a court should be wholly denied the use of a prison sentence if that is a realistic alternative which will satisfactorily deal with the particular case. We are simply trying to change the general drift of policy. In Scotland the presumption exists already, and it could be strengthened in some ways in England and Wales. We have to do something—we have to do a number of things —to deal with the burgeoning prison population and stop putting into prison people whose propensity to reoffend is not being reduced by putting them in prison again. The circumstances I have referred to do not seem to justify the extensive use of short sentences that we see now.