Don’t believe the scaremongering: prison release on temporary licence works
Reducing the numbers eligible for release on temporary licence will mean fewer people have the chance to become law abiding citizens and taxpayers.
Reducing the numbers eligible for release on temporary licence will mean fewer people have the chance to become law abiding citizens and taxpayers.
The Guardian reported this week that prison governors have been ordered to cut costs by £149m a year. Cuts aren’t the only regressive thing the coalition are doing to the criminal justice system, however.
Efforts by the coalition to reduce expenditure on prisons are fraught with problems, including, potentially, from the ever-reliable G4S.
Andrew Neilson, director of campaigns at the Howard League for Penal Reform, reports on the worrying figures on the number of children held in segregation.
This emphasises Labour’s need to put victims at the heart of our criminal justice system, and is a call to root the justice system in the community.
Far-right polemicist Peter Hitchens has said he’d like prisons to return to how they were in the 19th-century, and said he “doesn’t believe” in rehabilitation.
Rehabilitation costs money. A ‘prison works’ strategy costs money – as Clarke says it costs more to send a convict to jail than a schoolboy to Eton. The problem with Clarke is not that he’s soft or tough – its that he’s a cutter.
The Howard League for Penal Reform has today published its response to the government’s justice green paper, ‘Breaking the cycle: effective punishment, rehabilitation and sentencing of offenders’.
The Express reported today that 75 per cent of the ‘most serious crimes’ were not solved under the labour govt – yet failed to report crime overall fell by 43%.