Sentencing

 

My late wife was a barrister and many of my friends are judges, solicitors or barristers, so I have received quite a large number of varied views on the law from all sides of the argument.

I despair sometimes, but if there is any common thread that goes through everything I’ve heard, it is that catching perpetrators is actually a lot more important in terms of deterrence than the sentence given out. At a simple level there are places where you never park illegally, as you know that within a minute a warden will give you a ticket. But we also all know where we can get away it.

As to sentencing, we tend too much to lock people away from society and forget about them. We are never creative enough and always follow the same route that just means they go back to prison a few months or years later. We must do better.

I’m old enough to remember the story of man called Bill Fletcher, who wrote a book called Menace to Society. He’d spent half his life in jail and eventually ended up in Court for stealing money from a phone box on Christmas Eve. The Magistrate said he was going to give him the worst sentence he’d ever had. He gave him a conditional discharge and told him to see a Trust who dealt with ex-prisoners. The shock was too much for him and he reformed ending up as the doorman of the Shaw Theatre.

Now, that was an extreme case, but we must make the punishment fit the crime and the profile of the offender, so that they do not reoffend. At the simplest level, prison must educate and stop drug-taking, as these two actions will help tremendously. But in most cases all prisons do is baby-sit.