The purpose of sentencing
This is the first in a series of posts looking into the detail of the Independent Sentencing Review whose main recommendations I summarised here. Today’s post looks at the first Chapter in Mr Gauke’s report: “Revisiting the statutory purposes of sentencing”. In the first part of his report published in February this year, he concluded that the the principal cause of the current prison capacity crisis is that politicians from all political persuasions have continued to lengthen prison sentences in their desire to be tough on crime. Mr Gauke summarised the issue like this:
“The piecemeal and unstrategic manner in which sentence lengths have increased in recent decades has meant that there has been insufficient consideration of all of the statutory aims of sentencing: punishment, crime reduction, reform and rehabilitation, public protection and reparation. Punishment is an important aim for the criminal justice system and prison plays a vital role in delivering punishment. But too often decision-making has been based on an approach that punishment is all that matters, and that the only form of punishment that counts is imprisonment.”
It is therefore no surprise that in his first chapter of the full report he sets out his rationale for revisiting the five statutory purposes of sentencing and considering whether they meet the needs of a modern criminal justice system.
Protecting victims and reducing crime
Although it has become a central plant of political rhetoric for all parties to talk about putting victims at the heart of our criminal justice system, the reality (as any victim of crime or organisation supporting victims can testify to) is that the needs of victims are frequently ignored and that very little sustained effort is invested in keeping them informed about the criminal justice process of their case and in considering their needs alongside those of the Courts and the lawyers on both sides.
The review’s very first recommendation is to:
“Amend the statutory purposes of sentencing to emphasise the importance of protecting victims and reducing crime.”
Mr Gauek argues that the criminal justice system must specifically recognise the needs of victims as well as wider society by ensuring that the sentences offenders receive are transparent, and that the system works to protect victims by reducing crime and reoffending. Therefore, the Review recommends that the statutory purposes of sentencing are amended specifically to reference the need to protect victims, alongside the wider public.
The Review also recommends introducing “crime reduction” as an overarching principle that governs the five purposes of sentencing. The reason for this is an explicit recognition that despite the dominant political and media discourse, merely sending more people to prison for longer periods of time is not very effective in terms of reducing crime and preventing further victims. Indeed, we know from the evidence that short prison sentences (the subject of the next post in this series) are more likely to lead to entrenched patterns of offending and more crime.
Mr Gauke acknowledges that there is no hierarchy set out in law for how the purposes of sentencing should be applied, but argues that the trend for ever longer sentences without robust evidence of their impact on deterrence and reducing reoffending suggests there is an over-emphasis on the principle of punishment.
For this reason the Review also recommends clarifying that there is no hierarchy in the five purposes of sentencing. Mr Gauke notes that other jurisdictions list the purposes of sentencing, but go on to clarify that all are equally important.
For example, the law in New Zealand states that “to avoid doubt, nothing about the order in which the purposes appear in this section implies that any purpose referred to must be given greater weight than any other purpose referred to“.
Thanks to Andy Aitchison for kind permission to use the header image in this post. You can see Andy’s work here
