Ken clarke

There’s an intriguing pre-conference story in the Mail on Sunday today. The paper reports that: “Ken Clarke faces a whispering campaign by allies of David Cameron and George Osborne to move him from Justice Minister because of his ‘disastrous’ views on law and order, it was claimed last night. Conservative MPs say Mr Cameron and Mr Osborne are ‘ frustrated’ by Mr Clarke’s refusal to take a tougher line on key issues such as prison sentencing.” Clarke’s liberal views on criminal justice certainly are infuriating his colleagues. Allies of Theresa May have been heard to complain that “Ken is going to send the crime rate soaring and we’re going to

I’m not sure if the sun will ever rise in the east again: Michael Howard has supported a Ken Clarke prison policy. The Justice Secretary has launched a pilot scheme at HMP Peterborough that uses private bond investment to fund inmate remedial programmes to cut re-offending. The Social Impacts Bond will provide £5million to produce £8million over the course of six years, assuming the scheme is a success. The situation required boldness. For once tabloid melodrama is accurate: reoffending is the scourge of our times and its incidence has risen steadily over the last decade. According to Dame Anne Owers, the former chief inspector of prisons, one cause is that

Professor Ken Pease, the renowned criminologist, has written a report for the think-tank Civitas which rubbishes Ken Clarke’s plan to reduce prison numbers by extending community sentencing. Pease is of the Howard school: prison works. The key is that community sentences do not reduce reoffending. Pease estimates that 13,892 convicted offences could have been prevented by incarcerating prisoners for one extra month. The crimes for which offenders are convicted are a fraction of what they author. Pease quotes one estimate that there are 130 burglaries per conviction. Money is not saved by reducing incarceration because the costs associated with the victims (police time, NHS treatment, increased insurance premiums) increase. Using

Britain’s legal aid system continues to fail, and should be abolished for virtually all compensation claims. Reformed Conditional Fee Agreements (CFAs for short) should take its place. Those are the headline recommendations of the Adam Smith Institute’s latest report, written by legal expert Anthony Barton.   It’s not difficult to point to problems with legal aid, but the main one is that it encourages risk-free, speculative litigation, and fuels a costly compensation culture. The fact that claimants receiving legal aid are not responsible for defendants’ costs if their case is unsuccessful essentially puts them in a no-lose situation. Defendants, on the other hand, just can’t win – they’re going to

The government’s position is that prison does not work. It aims to reduce prison numbers and now Ken Clarke has announced that further savings will be made to the criminal justice budget. The Times reports (£) that Clarke will continue Labour’s policy of closing courts; 103 magistrates courts and 54 county courts will shut up shop. The Tories campaigned against court-closures at the fag-end of the last government; and there is whispered concern around Whitehall and Westminster that the concrete apparatus of justice is already over-stretched. But, savings must be made. Clarke’s closures will save a paltry £15.3 million from the annual £1.1bn budget; the bulk of cuts will come

Michael Howard appeared on today’s Daily Politics and laid into Ken Clarke’s ‘caricature’ of a policy to reduce prison places. There is, Howard argues and John Denham supported him, a correlation between increasing the number of those incarcerated and a fall in crime. In other words, prison still works. Howard criticised Clarke’s ‘rather foolish’ denial of that link. Howard echoes the Spectator’s editorial line that early release endangers society, and that it costs less in real terms to keep criminals in prison. Howard’s off-message critique is the most total I have yet seen, particularly on the statistical case against the government’s position. It is significant that it came from a

Ken Clarke has laid another argument against prison. There is no link, he alleges, between falling crime rates and spiralling prisoner numbers. Well, perhaps not, but it’s quite a coincidence. Clarke has been tasked with the impossible: assuring an easily frightened public that releasing prisoners will not lead to more muggings, robberies and intimidation. There are arguments on both sides. A recent Spectator editorial took the Michael Howard line that prison works and crime costs. The opposition does not contest either of those propositions, just if prison alone is the best way to reduce crime. The outgoing Chief Inspector of Prisons, Dame Anne Owers, argues in the Guardian for investment

Along with defence, there’s one other area where rolling back the state doesn’t come naturally to Conservatives: criminal justice. The massive cuts looming on the horizon for the criminal justice system would have been politically toxic for any party to deliver, but for the traditional party of law and order there will be a special discomfort.   Ken Clarke’s speech this morning was much less exciting for the penal reform/abolitionist lobby than the morning papers indicated. Echoing Nick Herbert’s speech to Policy Exchange last week, the Justice Secretary rightly said that that the test of a successful criminal justice system was not simply the number of people you lock up