Prison sentences must now fit the crime if violent attacks are to be halted – Yorkshire Post Letters

BILL Carmichael raises a significant issue (The Yorkshire Post, February 18) concerning sentencing and early release.

Why Sarah Everard tragedy must lead prompt tougher sentences for men who murder and attack women – Bill Carmichael

He rightly condemns the litany of failed ‘benefit of the doubt’ evidently afforded to the multiple offender Paul Robson, recently recaptured after absconding from the North Sea Camp open prison, where he was apparently on course for yet another ‘early release’ following an increasing series of sentences for recurrent and escalating assaults on young girls and women.

There are three issues that sentencing policy needs to address, namely appropriate punishment for offenders (with satisfactory recognition and respect for the distress and losses suffered by victims); attention to principles of restitution, redemption and forgiveness; and some limit on the financial cost of the penal system. At present, the balance is not right.

I have long wondered why it is that in so many cases where offenders are convicted at one hearing for multiple offences (perhaps a main one, and ‘others taken into account’) there are separate prison terms handed down for each offence and then specified to ‘run concurrently’. Only very occasionally does ‘consecutive’ sentencing appear, perhaps to reduce prison costs.

Surely once one crime is committed, we should not have a system which invites further offending on the basis that no additional imprisonment will result. Would it not be better if the idea of concurrent sentences were dropped in favour of more consecutive sentencing, perhaps with a scale of reducing tariffs?

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