A new approach to sentencing policy

Proof-based coverage

The favored narrative that locking extra individuals up and for longer will make our streets safer and strengthen our society, is just not supported by the proof. Present penal coverage is basically failing victims and offenders and certainly their community of relationships and wider society, and we’re missing the portray of the imaginative and prescient of the kind of society we wish to see. What would good seem like? We’ve got didn’t zoom out with the lens and ask what’s going to allow the strengthening and transformation of native communities and society as a complete.

So typically on this nation we see newspaper headlines and tragic instances driving our flesh pressers to make new legal guidelines which add to the burden skilled by our overcrowded prisons. In A brand new strategy to creating sentencing coverage, my intention is to assist Ministers to make goal, evidence-based sentencing coverage within the midst of an emotionally charged context based mostly on a distorted public notion of crime.

My strategy builds upon the Home of Commons Justice Choose Committee’s 2023 suggestions, and I’m proposing the institution of an impartial advisory physique on sentencing however at the side of an extra step to extend transparency in decision-making and to hyperlink funding to coverage adjustments. It’s a mannequin and paper which has been developed following confidential conversations held at Roundtables I convened in Westminster in 2023 and 2024 with parliamentarians and consultants within the subject of prison justice together with former jail governors, sentencing consultants, individuals with lived expertise and a former excessive courtroom decide. 

You may see a graphic illustrating the mannequin beneath.