Letters | 26 June 2010

Time to rehabilitate

Sir: The issue of whether or not ‘Prison works’ is confused in your leading article (19 June) with the broader arguments about reducing the National Offender Management Service’s £5 billion budget.

Even if the £2 billion of annual public expenditure on prisons was left largely intact, there is scope for savings and other benefits in localising the punishment and aftercare of offenders with much more input from voluntary and community groups. Such a localisation policy could result in better and less costly services in this part of the criminal justice system, provided sentencing reform was part of the package. To give one example: NOMS could hardly be doing worse at managing the many thousands of young offenders who are jailed with sentences of less than 12 months who in practice average three months inside. Their post-release reoffending rates are now 74 per cent — and rising.

Reducing such a scale of failure does indeed require the ‘rehabilitation revolution’ promised by the coalition government. The Spectator should not attempt the editorial mugging of Ken Clarke before he has had a chance to spell out the specific reforms which could cut both the number of crimes and the number of prisoners over the period of a parliament.

Jonathan Aitken
London



Back to Black

Sir: In fact, I liked Geoffrey Wheatcroft’s review of Sir Max Hastings’s book about Mr Churchill (Letters, 19 June), but was just inserting the word ‘jejune’ because Mr Wheatcroft had questioned my use of it in an otherwise generally favourable review he wrote of my book about Richard Nixon in 2007. I too struggled with the Venerable Bede, though not in such an ancient and cloistered place as Mr Wheatcroft did, and can set his mind at ease that I have been quite familiar with the meaning of the word since those far-off days.