Police bill will push prisons ‘to breaking point’
'The official Impact Assessment noted there would be “Less chance of effective rehabilitation in an overstretched system".'
The Police, Crime, Sentencing and Court (PCSC) Bill will push the prison system to breaking point, the Quakers in Criminal Justice group has said.
Melanie Jameson, co-clerk of the group, said: ‘Part Seven of the PCSC expands the original content of this legislation (a white paper on “Smarter Sentencing”). Unsurprisingly, the direction of travel is ever more punitive, pushing the overcrowded and understaffed prison system to breaking point. The official Impact Assessment noted there would be “Less chance of effective rehabilitation in an overstretched system”.’
Measures of the new bill that the group flags up include: new mandatory life-sentence offences, including for causing death by dangerous driving; some children receiving custodial terms in line with adults; automatic release delayed to the two-thirds point; and a ten-year maximum sentence for defacing a statue or memorial.
There is also concern about Part Ten of the bill, which refers to community provisions. According to Melanie Jameson from Malvern Meeting, this includes ‘significant increases in the use of curfew periods, enforced by electronic monitoring’.
The group also highlights two other issues raised during the long debate in the House of Lords before the bill was ratified. These include ‘sentence inflation’ – the fear that as certain sentences lengthen, there will be a knock-on effect on other sentences becoming longer. Another concern, said Melanie Jameson, is that the increase in custodial sentences reinforces a misleading idea that this acts as a deterrent, when this is not backed up by evidence. According to the criminal justice group Clinks, in the last ten years, the average prison sentence has increased by almost two years and the number of people sentenced to over ten years has more than tripled, giving us the highest level of imprisonment in Europe.
Campaigners are also criticising how the PCSC affects the Gypsy/Roma/Traveller community, with a new offence of ‘residing on land without consent in or with a vehicle’. Existing police powers have been amended to allow the police to remove these ‘unauthorised encampments’, including the vehicles which are also their homes.
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