The Justice Secretary today called for a major overhaul of sentencing and a national debate on updating punishment for offenders.
David Gauke suggested short prison terms could her scrapped, while fraudsters and drug barons could be hit with foreign travel bans and spending curbs after leaving jail.
He added that a sentencing system was needed that focused not on being “hard” or “soft”, but on the best ways of protecting the public and preventing offending.
Mr Gauke’s made his comments in a speech to the think-tank Reform in London, where he outlined his ideas for the future of the justice system.
He emphasised that he did not want to stop tough sentences being imposed for serious crimes, but warned that a different approach was needed to achieve more effective rehabilitation and stop the already-high prison population growing further.
“I think now is the time for us as a society, as a country, to start a fresh conversation, a national debate, about what justice, including punishment, should look like for our modern times,” Mr Gauke said.
He added: “We should be extremely cautious about continuing to increase sentences as a routine response to concerns over crime. Such an approach would lead us to becoming even more of an international and historical outlier in terms of our prison population.”
The Justice Secretary said there was a “strong case” for scrapping short sentences of six months or less altogether. This was because they were too short to rehabilitate or deter offenders, while they also disrupted families and offenders’ access to benefits and treatment programmes. Instead, technology could be used to “impose greater restrictions on people’s movements and lifestyle” and ensure that alternative community punishments were effective.
He said that technology such as GPS tagging and alcohol desistance bracelets, which are fitted to check that offenders comply with drinking bans, could be used to achieve this.
In addition, new methods were needed to ensure major criminals who had made large illicit profits were not able to enjoy the rewards after their release. Mr Gauke said these measures could include foreign travel bans, spending curbs and driving restrictions, as part of “an unprecedented level of punitive sanctions outside prison”.
The aim would be achieve “a real shift in the standard of living a wealthy criminal can expect after prison” and to ensure that such offenders did not enjoy any “lifestyle benefits” from their crime once they had sat out their prison sentence.
Mr Gauke added that other changes could include more use of temporary release of inmates to help them reintegrate into society.
