Cut, cut, cut short-term prisoner numbers…

18.09.09

There has been much discussion about cuts this week from both the Conservatives and now Labour. My concern is that this haggling about cuts detracts from another important issue, which is how existing public expenditure can be better used. This is never more urgent than in criminal  justice.

Make Justice Work is not advocating sweeping cuts throughout the system – what it is campaigning for is much more sensible use of existing resources, which can help to maintain public safety, reduce overcrowding in prisons and can impact on reducing the level of re-offending amongst those low level offenders who come in and out of prison with increased regularity. Paul Tidball (Cash crisis in prisoner rehabilitation scheme adds to overcrowding, Sep 17) is absolutely right to point out his concern that the mismatch between prison places and the resources to make sentences work is effectively clogging up the system with those longer sentenced prisoners who could access rehabilitation. Remove the thousands of low level offenders from prisons into well resourced and effective community sentences and you will free up badly needed resources to work with those more complex prisoners.

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