Low-level offenders will be made to clean up graffiti and plant trees instead of being sent to jail in a bid to solve a major overcrowding situation in UK prisons.
Justice Secretary Alex Chalk is set to unveil a string of reforms to sentencing amid claims judges have been told to delay punishing violent criminals like rapists because there’s nowhere to put them.
Justice Chalk said that the changes would see rapist serve their full term, removing the possibility of releasing them halfway through to serve the rest of their time on remand.
However, he said that the government had to look at the way less serious offenders ‘repay their debt to society’, citing the example of the US state of Texas, which is ‘not known for its relaxed approach to criminal justice’.
Writing in the Sunday Telegraph, Justice Chalk said: ‘We need to look again at low-level offenders. Because while the overall reoffending rate is 25 per cent, the rate for people who spend fewer than 12 months in prison is over 50 per cent,’ he said.
‘A short stretch of a few months inside isn’t enough time to rehabilitate criminals but is more than enough to dislocate them from the family, work and home connections that keep them from crime. Too often, offenders routinely turn back to crime as soon as they walk out of the prison gates.’
Judges and magistrates would adopt a ‘presumption’ that criminals facing shorter prison terms should instead receive ‘robust community orders’ designed to rehabilitate them.
The measures could apply to offenders including thieves and shoplifters but anyone found guilty of a sexual or violent offence would be excluded, it has been reported previously.
Four years ago, former justice secretary David Gauke unveiled plans for the abolition of six-month sentences. These were abandoned by Boris Johnson when he became prime minister in 2019. Similar plans had also been mooted by Rory Stewart.
A newspaper outlet understands that the announcement is expected to include a significant extension of an electronic tagging scheme.
The ‘home detention curfew’ tag programme was broadened as recently as February, when the amount of time offenders could get off their sentences was increased from four and a half months to six. It could now be extended again to as much as 12 months, it is understood.
Justice Chalk wrote: ‘There are alternatives to having low-level offenders languishing in prison. Judges can make them repay their debt to society in communities – cleaning up neighbourhoods, scrubbing graffiti off walls, and even helping to plant new forests. And with technology moving on rapidly, these options are growing. The latest GPS tags, for example, offer many more options than the radio frequency versions, which were the only ones available to the court when I first started my career as a prosecutor.
This is more deck chair shuffling to cover up this Government’s failure to build new prisons, having closed numerous prisons. Couple that failure with the fact that the population has increased and criminals have flooded in through an open border using up what space there is.
More prisons need to be built, but that’s far too sensible for our Government to figure out.
Prison is no longer a deterrent. Shoplifters living on the streets need a warm place to stay in the winter and often make sure they’re arrested and charged and then go to prison so that they have a meal, a bed and a warm place to stay during the winter months, then come out, shoplift again through the summer and then go back to prison in the winter.
What the government needs to do is teach a man to fish because making money is much more fun than going to prison and we should be teaching these people a trade so that they can come out and make some money, instead of stealing it.
Most minor crimes are caused because the youngsters of today have nothing to do with their time, so they just hang around on street corners and then end up doing a crime because there’s nothing else for them to do, and it’s far more interesting to rob a little old lady than to be on a street corner scratching their balls.
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