The Government will “rebuild” community sentences to ensure they have public confidence and cut reoffending, the Justice Secretary has said.
In an interview with the PA news agency, Shabana Mahmood said it was “in everyone’s collective interest” to focus on rehabilitation while 80% of offenders are reoffenders, but stressed that public safety was “non-negotiable”.
She said: “Punishment and rehabilitation, in my view, go hand-in-hand. They are part of the same picture.
“You can’t have one without the other, and that is the justice system we are going to be repairing and then rebuilding over the course of this Parliament.”
Her comments follow remarks by prisons minister Lord Timpson, who told a fringe event at the Labour Party conference on Tuesday that community orders needed to be “trusted more by the courts” as an alternative to jail.
Lord Timpson said the Labour Government was going to carry out a review of sentencing policy “at speed” as he accused his predecessors in the Ministry of Justice of failing to “follow the evidence” about which measures work to curb reoffending.
On Wednesday, Ms Mahmood told PA she did not “blame” judges for not using more community sentences, adding: “I think we have to rebuild what community punishment looks like.”
She said: “Wherever the punishment or rehabilitation work takes place, whether that’s inside a prison in custody, or whether it’s outside in the community, for me, as a constituency Member of Parliament and as the Justice Secretary, what is non-negotiable is that the public has to have confidence in that system.
“We will never, ever sacrifice public protection, and we want the public to look and feel and believe that whether in prison or outside of prison, offenders are being appropriately punished and then helped on their rehabilitation journey.”
The Government is expected to make further announcements on its long-term plans for the criminal justice system before Christmas, and Ms Mahmood said she also hoped to make progress on dealing with prisoners still serving indefinite imprisonment for public protection (IPP) sentences.
IPP sentences can see offenders kept in custody long after the minimum period of their sentence has passed and were abolished in 2012, with the then-government describing them as “indefensible”.
However, this was not retrospective and more than 1,000 people are still serving IPP sentences at a time when prisons are severely overcrowded.
The new Government has already made changes to the parole conditions that apply to IPP prisoners, and Ms Mahmood told PA she believed she could make further progress.
But she added that she would not “play fast and loose with public protection”, saying some IPP prisoners were “in a very difficult situation, potentially a danger to themselves and others”.
Looking ahead to the Budget, she said she would be “going in to bat” for the justice system during negotiations with the Treasury, including on funding to tackle the backlog in the crown courts.
More than 67,500 cases are waiting to be heard in the crown courts, with Ms Mahmood saying she was “horrified” by the rates at which victims were dropping out of cases as a result and would be setting out plans to tackle the backlog later in the autumn.
She said: “As a former barrister, I know that justice delayed is justice denied.”
