Gauke’s review and reforming justice

What do you do when you’ve committed to prison sentences as the cure for crime, but your prisons are now full to capacity and there’s abundant evidence to show that this approach doesn’t work in cutting crime or keeping people safe?

Arguably, if you’re this government, you follow the evidence and implement the recommendations put forward in the latest Independent Sentencing Review overseen by David Gauke, the former Conservative Justice Secretary. 

Certainly, the evidence is in on the effectiveness of our current system. The Ministry of Justice’s own statistics show clearly that by any objective metric, when it comes to reducing reoffending and encouraging re-integration, suspended and community sentences work a lot more effectively than immediate custody.

The recommendations

From a practitioner’s point of view, there are some very welcome developments here. Knowing as we do that short prison sentences can still be long enough to turn someone’s life upside down, proposals to raise the upper limit of suspended sentences and their interventions to three years would be significant, positive steps.

This would also be true of an increased emphasis on community orders rather than short custodial sentences, as well as the recommendations on deferred sentences which would allow defendants to keep their lives somewhat more in order in readiness for their release.

The removal of post-sentence supervision requirements for sentences of fewer than two years might, however, raise some concerns; someone who is struggling with multiple issues requiring community intervention needs more supervision, not less.

But then, the report acknowledges there is another brutal reality to contend with; the probation service is underfunded and overstretched as it is and is working within a wider social fabric that is frayed to the point of coming apart. 

Properly resourcing their work would be a necessary step to progress, yet this is offset by a recognition in the report that ‘resources are, and are likely to remain, stretched’ meaning that probation is still required to ‘prioritise’ its supervision of those in its charge, which, on a cynical reading, might describe the continued reality of having to do more with less.

This creates the frustrating impression that this review and its recommendations, while welcome in many respects, are still patching up the cracks in the system rather than engaging with the wholesale renovation that is needed to stop the edifice of justice from tumbling down.

The need to overhaul the justice system

One excellent way of doing this would be to work comprehensively to reduce the social pressures that correlate strongly with crime and anti-social behaviour, addressing housing instability, poor mental health provision and the consequences of criminalising drug use, and looking again at our long-standing national tendency to treat criminalising problematic behaviour as the best (or the first) means of securing the public good.

In other words, a genuinely holistic overhaul of the justice system would require much wider investment across all of society. There is plenty of evidence to show that this would keep more people from coming into contact with the criminal justice system in the first place.

The authors of the Gauke review, understandably, do not go into great detail on this, recognising that those inside the criminal justice system have ‘a limited number of levers’ to mitigate crime and keep the public safe. Ultimately, they recognise that ‘reducing the number of people entering the criminal justice system’ will be the greatest means of ensuring we do not experience future capacity crises, as well as, I would add, indicating that our society as a whole is much better off. 

We turn, then, to the government, who have considerably more levers to pull.