The Prime Minister gave a stirring speech last week in which he outlined the government’s new policy on law and order. The key, he insisted, was to be ‘tough and intelligent’ — which naturally suggested that previous policy had been soft and stupid. The truth, however, is that there is much more continuity between the old policy and the new than David Cameron suggested. One of the ‘new’ policies is ‘two strikes and you’re out’: if you commit two serious violent or sexual offences, you will get an automatic life sentence. Similar regimes have been promised before. Previous Labour governments introduced ‘indeterminate sentences for public protection’ for serious offences. Their point was to ensure that any criminal who was given one would not be released until determined to be ‘safe’ by the probation authorities. Those sentences were often, in effect, life sentences. The coalition abolished them earlier this year, partly because they were blocking up the prisons.
‘Two strikes and you’re out’ is not a promise that can be kept. It would increase the number of people in prison. The prisons are full, and there is no money to build more. This was why Ken Clarke, Mr Grayling’s predecessor, insisted that he was going to get the prison population down. He promised a ‘rehabilitation revolution’: more offenders sentenced to ‘community punishments’, which would diminish the rate at which they were reconvicted and so ended up back in prison.
Mr Clarke’s ‘rehabilitation revolution’ had the same effect as the many previous attempts to diminish reoffending: virtually nothing. The Prime Minister is relying on a rehab revolution, too, to empty the cells needed for ‘two strikes and you’re out’. Over the past 40 years in Britain, almost every variety of rehabilitation programme has been tried on criminals in the hope of reforming them into honest citizens.
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