Toughen up on sentencing says senior judge

Judge Paul Darlow has called for tougher punishments, such as increased constraints on offenders’ free time as well as confiscating their cars, in an effort to combat crime.

He also said the public had largely lost confidence in community sentences, which often involve criminals completing unpaid work in their local area.

In an interview this week, the resident Crown Court judge for Plymouth said: “Custody, particularly when applied to short-term periods, has been shown to be expensive and largely ineffectual in preventing reoffending.

“It does serve a limited purpose in keeping some offenders out of circulation for short periods of time.

“However, the other side of the coin is the public perception of community orders as focusing on the rehabilitation and not the punishment of the offender.”

His comments come amid the revelation that almost 400 criminals carrying out community service reoffend before completing their punishment every week.

In response to the figures, a Ministry of Justice spokesman said: “The majority of offenders successfully complete their community sentences and do not go on to commit further crimes.

“However, reoffending rates are too high, which is why we are reforming the criminal justice system so offenders are properly punished and the root causes of their behaviour addressed.

“We have completed a consultation on the future shape of community sentences to make them tougher and will set out our approach in due course.”

The MoJ spokesman added: “Our plans to restore public confidence in community sentences include prohibiting foreign travel and imposing longer, more restrictive curfews.

“We will also be making Community Payback more intensive and demanding, with unemployed offenders serving longer hours, carrying out purposeful, unpaid activity which benefits their local community.”

Devon-based Judge Darlow suggested a number of possible components of a community sentence in order to restore the public’s faith in them.

These include increasing the number of hours an offender can spend on curfew from the current maximum of 12 hours a day to 16, and increasing the number of hours spent carrying out community service to make it more in line with a typical working week, as well as greater financial penalties.

Last month, a report by prisons and probation inspectors for England and Wales found that serious criminals were leaving prison without having been on programmes designed to stop reoffending.

It found no plans to deliver treatment programmes to a third of sex offenders needing them, with most of the 11 prisons examined lacking capacity to meet demand for courses.

The watchdogs say that two years after Justice Secretary Kenneth Clarke promised a “rehabilitation revolution”, there are still not enough places on recognised programmes to tackle criminal “thoughts and attitude” and many that are available are not of high enough quality.

The joint inspection report was based on examining the records of 220 prisoners in 11 jails across England and Wales that hold long-term prisoners, and interviews with 178 prison staff charged with drawing up a sentence plan in the case of each inmate.

In 2011, a record number of 
offenders sentenced for serious crimes were found to have committed previous offences.

Some 90 per cent of those sentenced in England and Wales had offended before – and almost a third had committed or were linked to 15 or more crimes.