Top judge issues prison overcrowding warning
Updated on 16 November 2007
Britain's top judge has warned that prison overcrowding has reached a critical point and insisted: "We simply cannot go on like this".
Lord Chief Justice Lord Phillips said tougher sentences introduced four years ago are putting more pressure on jails and that ministers have failed to fully appreciate the impact the policy is having.
In a speech to an event organised by the Howard League for Penal Reform in the City of London, Lord Phillips said: "Unless Parliament is prepared to provide whatever resources are necessary to give effect to the sentences that judges choose, in their discretion, to impose, Parliament must re-examine the legislative framework for sentencing.
"I do not believe that these simple propositions have been fully appreciated by those responsible for formulating criminal policy to which Parliament is invited to give effect. The scale of sentences is now largely determined by Parliament.
"Where within that scale the facts of a particular offence fall is the judge's task. Parliament should, when altering that scale, have regard to the resource implications of the changes that are proposed. "
Describing the impact of the record jail population, the judge said: "We are at present in a critical situation. We simply cannot go on like this."
The judge said some of the consequences of the 2003 Criminal Justice Act - which led to longer sentences for murder and a range of other serious crimes - appeared not to have been foreseen by the Government.
"If you decide to lock up one man for a minimum term of 30 years, you are investing £1 million or more in punishing him," he said.
"That sum could pay for quite a few surgical operations or for a lot of remedial training in some of the schools where the staff are struggling to cope with the problems of trying to teach children who cannot even understand English."
He told the audience of the event, held at the offices of Clifford Chance solicitors, that he hoped the forthcoming report on jails by government trouble-shooter Lord Carter of Coles would trigger a public debate on linking sentencing with funding.
"That debate should consider the extent to which resources should be devoted to funding, not merely imprisonment, but the other types of sentence now available to the courts which aim both to punish and to rehabilitate so as to prevent re-offending," he said.
"Such a debate will be of no avail, indeed it will probably not be a possibility, unless those taking part are prepared to put to one side the opportunities that this subject always provides for scoring political points and to consider objectively what is in the best interests of our society.
"I believe that the time is ripe for such a debate."
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