Douglas Carswell's Blog

Crime Commissioners to the rescue

Another week, another attempt to turn the criminal justice system into a giant restorative justice, let's-all-sit-down-and-talk-about-it workshop.

Today something called the Women’s Justice Taskforce suggests, according to reports, that we abolish prison sentencing for women altogether. Instead, it would like half the population to only ever serve “community-based sentences”, no matter how serious the crime.       

Seeing as how the Women’s Justice Taskforce is supported by the Prison Reform Trust, which has as one of its aims the "promotion of alternatives to custody”, these “findings” perhaps tell us more about the prejudices of the people who wrote it than they can ever tell us about how to deal with crime.

It might be tempting to dismiss all this as yet more publicly-funded daftness - even though the Ministry of Justice has apparently "welcomed" it.  The trouble is that these are precisely the sort of ideas and assumptions that are taking hold at the Sentencing Council, and the various other criminal justice quangos that now call the shots over criminal justice. Unless held in check, today’s daft ideas will become tomorrow’s public policy. 

How to stop the rot? We need to make those who run the criminal justice system answer to ordinary people, not leftie quangocrats. 

The good news is that from next May everyone should (House of Lords permitting) get the chance to vote for a Police and Crime Commissioner. Initially, their role will be to set priorities for the local constabulary. 

But why not go further and abolish the Sentencing Council, allowing local Crime Chiefs to set sentencing guidelines locally? Let different counties adopt locally determined approaches to sentencing.  More to the point, let the people who run the Prison Reform Trust stand for office.  Perhaps there is, afterall, something in this no-to-prisons-yes-to-community-sentencing approach.  Let's let local people decide.       

You only need to suggest that to see how absurdly out of touch the advocates of the anti-prisons agenda are.  And to appreciate the extent to which those who run the criminal justice system have long since stopped answering to the rest of us. 

Bring on the Crime Commissioners .....

Back to all posts