Ken Clarke: too many people in jail?
By James Wilson
Justice Secretary Ken Clarke caused some media reaction early in his tenure when he suggested that too many people were in jail. Unless one is a jobbing form of Home Office accountant, concerned about the prison budget above all those intangible notions like justice or public safety, the statistics would suggest otherwise.
A few numbers should suffice: it is estimated that 9.59 million crimes were committed in England and Wales in 2009. 1.4 million people were convicted during the year, but only 100,190 of them were sentenced to immediate jail terms after being convicted. Accordingly, about one per cent of crimes result in an immediate jail term.
It is therefore hard to imagine how Mr Clarke plans on making it any more difficult to send anyone to jail than it already is. It is also hard to imagine why anyone has cause to complain that jail fails to rehabilitate people – given that anyone unfortunate enough to go to jail has just committed his or her 100th offence, such a person can be presumed to be a pretty hardened criminal already.
One should also consider the mindset accompanying the commission of any particular offence. Very roughly put, one might split crimes into two categories: spur of the moment actions in which the offender responds excessively to real or imagined provocation; or planned crimes such as burglary or those of calculated revenge.
In the former category the offender is by definition not acting rationally and thus the crime and punishment regime will be of minimal relevance to him.
In the latter category any rational criminal will consider first and foremost the chances of apprehension and conviction first, and the likely sentence second. And with a conviction rate of one per cent, the deterrent value can reasonably be said to be low.
There is one caveat – the above figures include all offences, not simply violent or otherwise more serious ones. Even if one isolates the figures for such offences, however, it does not make for much better reading. Approximately 40,000 violent offenders a year escape merely with cautions. It amounts to a strange notion of justice.
The above statistics come from recent stories in the Daily Telegraph. Elsewhere the paper contains a different perspective on crime, which it might also repay Mr Clarke to read as he ponders his next move with the criminal justice system.
No related posts.
I take issue with the premise that we can draw meaningful conclusions on how many people we should be putting into prison merely by looking at the overall number of crimes that it is estimated are committed in England and Wales each year; particularly without any detailed examination of what offences make up that figure. Presumably a very significant proportion of the 9.59 million crimes cited is made up of minor offences, such as minor road traffic offences, for which a sentence of imprisonment would be inappropriate, except possibly in the most extreme of cases. Even having regard to violent offences, these still cover a very broad range of offences, from multiple murders to common assaults, and it is probably quite right that the police deal with some of the cases at the more minor end of the spectrum with a caution, or that the justices dispose of them with a non-custodial sentence. Whether it is appropriate to sentence someone to a term of imprisonment can only really be determined having regard to the seriousness of the offence committed, and the surrounding circumstances, in any particular case, not by a process of extrapolation from the crime figures of a ‘correct’ number of offenders that should be imprisoned.
I am not sure the figure of 9.59 million crimes estimated to have occurred in 2009 has any meaningful place in a discussion about sentencing, when the majority of those crimes have not been subject to the judicial system.
The sentencing picture is much better illustrated if one takes the number of defendants who entered the criminal justice process. There were 1,693,191 defendants proceeded against in all courts in 2009. 1,407,456 of those were found guilty. 94,586 of those were sentenced at the Crown Court, and of those, 88,889 were guilty of an indictable offence. I use the stats relating to the Crown Court and indictable offences on an assumption that a great number of serious offences that one might expect to result in a custodial sentence are likely to be channelled in this way.
From a total of 88,889 offenders guilty of indictable offences sentenced in the Crown Court in 2009, 50,241 were given an immediate custodial sentence (57%). This lends some context to the claim that “one per cent of crimes result in an immediate jail term”. Whether you think the custodial rate should be higher is for debate, but I doubt that it would be wise to base opinion on the facts as presented in this Telegraph article.
Information taken from http://www.justice.gov.uk/sentencing-stats2009.pdf
Oh I realise the figures were a bit OTT – just meant to jab something back at the relaxed Ken about his vague witterings about “too many people in jail”. There are several meaningful stats here:
- Number of actual crimes. This can’t be known as we have no way of finding out how many crimes were committed but the victim never reported it, eg sex abuse cases which if some reports are to be believed have low rates of reporting.
- Number of reported crimes.
- Number of reported “serious” crimes.
- Number of convictions for reported “serious” crimes.
- Number of custodial sentences for reported “serious” crimes.
- Actual length of sentences served as against sentence handed down.
- Number of offences committed by offenders on parole.
- Number of repeat offenders generally.
From stats I have seen that are indeed rather more reliable than those of the DT I think the ratio of reported violent or otherwise serious offences committed to custodial sentences is about 20:1. But I don’t think the only question is the rate of imprisonment v number of convictions. The number of convictions versus reported serious offences is surely relevant too. If the fact is that most violent criminals only get caught after committing 20 offences, then it is a bit artificial to refer to “first time offenders” and lament the lack of rehabilitation in prison, since statistically most would be fairly hardened criminals to begin with.
And no, there isn’t a “right” number of prisoners; the number (ideally) should simply reflect the number of appropriate sentences to the number of crimes. Certainly it would be nice if prison was better at reforming people, but that’s another question.
And here is a good case in point – A G’s ref (no 65 of 2010) R v Dawson.
The initial sentence passed was a gross affront to justice. Admittedly the AG’s ref countered the injustice somewhat in the particular case, but what planet the judge below was on was anyone’s guess.
A 96 page green paper can hardly be described as vague.
A MoJ compendium of reoffending stats from Nov 2010 (link below) states that 64 percent of newly sentenced prisoners admitted to drug use in the month before custody. A study published in the same compendium found that 37 percent of prisoners will need help finding somewhere to live on release, 12 percent had a mental illness or depression, 20 percent needed help with an emotional or mental health problem, 24 percent had been taken into care as children, 47 percent had no qualifications, 13 percent had never had a paid job. For these people, the threat of prison will never act as a deterrent to crime, as suggested in the original post. If sentences were longer and more severe, and if convictions rates rose, I do not believe that people falling into the categories above would adjust their behaviour patterns if their life experiences and conditions remained the same. The point is, the reasons people offend are not as simple as whether they’ll get away with it.
Reforming offenders is central to the question; indeed it is the central point of Ken Clarke’s green paper. The proposals in the paper were intended to reduce reoffending rates which currently stand at over 60 percent. 75 percent of offenders sentenced to youth custody reoffend within a year. The paper puts forward plans to divert offenders with mental health, alcohol or drug abuse problems into treatment programmes, remand fewer minors in custody, increase sentences where there is a public protection dimension, run community payback schemes. These are not vague, but very clear, proposals, which address the effects of drug and alcohol abuse, mental illness, lack of education and unstable childhoods on crime, but still protect society from offenders of violent crimes.
http://www.justice.gov.uk/publications/docs/compendium-of-reoffending-statistics-and-analysis.pdf