Lord Carter recommended that ‘local’ community prisons should be built, so that families can visit offenders; a vital part of rehabilitation. Yet the government instead opted for economy of scale; the building of ‘titan’ prisons is now the policy. However, there is a third way that could allow localism to happily exist side by side with titan prisons. This third way already exists right under their noses. The disused police station custody suites, up and down the country, that are currently housing convicts, have proved to be perfectly effective. Rather than using these cells as overflow from the prisons, we should use them as community prisons.
The main frustration that judges have with their sentencing options is the disparity between community sentences and jail sentences. As a legal executive who defends people arrested by the police, I’m often asked, ‘What do you think I’m going to get?’ I always tell them whether they are looking at jail or not. It doesn’t matter how serious the community punishment is likely to be, the avoidance of jail is the overwhelming concern of a person who is facing a punishment.
So when people say jail doesn’t work, what they mean is that jail tends not to prepare offenders for a straight life, while community sentences do tend to be more constructive, more character-building. To spend 200 hours cleaning up graffiti gives the offender the chance to work in a team and do something constructive with his time. However, fear of jail acts as a disincentive. Imagine the young burglar deciding not to do it after thinking, ‘Hang on. If I get caught, I’m gonna have to plant daffodils again.’
So in other words, the community punishment tends to persuade the offender that crime is simply wrong, while jail is a disincentive. Objective and subjective. The frustration judges have is when there is nothing in between. They would like to be able to provide the offender with a short sharp shock, followed by a community punishment, but the prisons hate to process an offender coming in, only to have to process him out, a couple of weeks later.
Judge Peter Jacobs of Norwich Crown Court said it well when he was quoted in the Times last month. ‘Judges like me are between a rock and a hard place. We are told prisons are full and the reality is we bend over backwards to give these community orders and too often they don’t work.’
Probably the best advocates of the short sharp shock are those who have received it. The football player Ian Wright was persistently in trouble with the law for driving without a license. ‘When they caught up with me I went to Chelmsford prison for 14 days. The sound of those prison doors closing and the nutters inside taught me: I can’t live my life like this.’
If the local magistrate was able to sentence a local offender to one week in the custody of one of these local custody suites, followed by a community sentence, that magistrate may be able to avoid sentencing the offender to a six month prison term. The offender’s wife/girlfriend would be able to visit each day to talk about what kind of future they want. The other 23 hours the offender can stare at four walls. On release he would finish his punishment with the community component of the sentence. This way we could have localised sentencing, where disincentive is combined with character building and the avoidance of lengthy jail sentences is achieved.
Dan McCurry works as a legal executive is East London, defending people arrested in the police station under the legal aid scheme