Genial justice

New brooms indeed: Kenneth Clarke has given us all plenty to think about. We live in strange times when the old bang 'em up Tories are thinking creatively and having photo-shoots on A Wing with some of the inmates, while the numbers locked up in the Labour years has rocketed from where it was when the Conservatives were last in power.

Then we have some closures of dear old magistrates courts in the far flung reaches of the criminal justice system, where many teeth were cut by earnest young pupils and eager young solicitors in all those failing to stop and drink drive cases.

Now presumably these venerable old court houses will be turned into wine bars or quirky houses '“ a bit like that television advert for a Building Society where a family are buying an old police station because it 'ticks all the right boxes'.

I have to wonder, by the way, who considers that a large charge sergeant's desk and some cells, plus rackety old offices and a canteen, are essential to modern day family living, but there you are '“ no accounting for taste. Mind you, the old Oxford prison is now a hotel (presumably without slopping out) and you can all go to sleep in plush bedrooms where once upon a time generations of men, old and young, whiled away literally years of their lives staring at the ceiling and a lot of them, over time, cried themselves to sleep through fear, homesickness, regret or loneliness.

Bang 'em out

So what has Lord Chancellor Ken got in store for us all? Well it is all sounding pretty good - he wants sensible sentencing that does not see the short term merry-go-round of come-and-go prisoners. He wants to see constructive sentences for many offences. He wants a higher threshold for custody in the first place.

His big problem is going to be the Great British public. The trouble is that we are very keen on revenge. We think that unless somebody is locked up for a long time then we have gone soft on the criminals and they are laughing at us and will just do it again. How then do we make community punishments credible in the eyes of the public? Do we fear that community penalties are no deterrence to potential offenders? Getting the message over is a very big task, but is worth while. In all the debate about cutting public spending it seems to me that we should not be taking those elements that constitute a capital investment in terms of deterrence.

In the same way that investing in health education and alcohol pricing may mean in the future we have fewer expensive hospital treatments of lung cancer, diabetes, heart attacks and stroke '“ as well as a reduction in the huge amount of public money incurred as a consequence of a drunken fight '“ we should invest in drug rehab, domestic violence programmes and sex offender programmes. These are expensive up-front, but can more than repay themselves many times over in the future when there are fewer drug related offences, or violent or sexual offences.

All change

Then we have the new idea of courts sitting in shifts '“ as has begun in Croydon. Here there is a 9.30am to 1pm session and then an afternoon session that finishes at 6.30pm. That will be a shock to the system. Most advocates do not expect to still be in court gone 4.30pm, or indeed in court before 10am. There is something rather unsporting about the hours beyond these times. But on the late or early shift we shall find ourselves. In theory it allows more time for preparation, though whether turf wars are going to break out among advocates and the judiciary along the lines of 'who has moved my pencil case/water jug/ copy of Archbold/wig', who can say.

I also like the idea of mobile courts '“ so that the court may be in a bus and we all get to do our business in a supermarket car-park or on a coach rank somewhere. I wonder where we shall get changed and have our conferences and so on, but it will be quite good fun doing a nice piece of mitigation on a bus. Presumably these won't be custody cases, unless the prisoners are going to be stuffed in the boot of the coach and then transferred onto a van at Watford Gap Services. Or perhaps we'll do the trial and then drop the guilty defendant off at the nearest prison on our way home - 'ding ding, mind the doors, next stop Long Lartin for a five year stretch'.

So we do have a lot to think about. In a few years time, when we spend the early morning in court and then the afternoon on a coach and our clients are no longer going away for long or short stretches but are getting many more community penalties and sorting out their drug and violence problems, it will be a brave new world indeed. We shall live in old prisons and court houses and compare with the neighbours the quality of the graffiti or the superiority of the bars on our windows: 'Darling I think you'll find that these are genuine Category A bars, whereas yours are really only Cat C '“ charming of course but not the same thing at all.'

In fact it will be a very strange new world '“ all of the law abiding citizens will be on the inside and all the criminals will be on the outside. Hmm'¦definitely plenty to think about there, then.