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Order in the Courts Restoring Trust Through Local Justice

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Order in the Courts Restoring Trust Through Local Justice Breakthrough Britain Order in the Courts Restoring trust through local justice A Policy Report from the Courts and Sentencing Working Group Chaired by Martin Howe QC November 2009 About the Centre for Social Justice The Centre for Social Justice aims to put social justice at the heart of British politics. Our policy development is rooted in the wisdom of those working to tackle Britain’s deepest social problems and the experience of those whose lives have been affected by poverty. Our working groups are non-partisan, comprising prominent academics, practitioners and policy makers who have expertise in the relevant fields. We consult nationally and internationally, especially with charities and social enterprises, who are the champions of the welfare society. In addition to policy development, the CSJ has built an alliance of poverty fighting organisations that reverse social breakdown and transform communities. We believe that the surest way the Government can reverse social breakdown and poverty is to enable such individuals, communities and voluntary groups to help themselves. The CSJ was founded by Iain Duncan Smith in 2004, as the fulfilment of a promise made to Janice Dobbie, whose son had recently died from a drug overdose just after he was released from prison. Chairman: Rt Hon. Iain Duncan Smith MP Executive Director: Philippa Stroud Breakthrough Britain: Order in the Courts © The Centre for Social Justice, 2009 Published by the Centre for Social Justice, 9 Westminster Palace Gardens, Artillery Row, SW1P 1RL www.centreforsocialjustice.org.uk ISBN: 9780956208842 Designed by SoapBox, www.soapboxcommunications.co.uk The quotations, references and commentary on the photographs in this document bear no relation to the actual individuals pictured. 2 Contents Preface by Iain Duncan Smith 6 Chairman’s Foreword 9 Members of the Courts and Sentencing Working Group 12 Executive Summary 15 Chapter 1: Introduction 35 1.1 The Working Group’s Remit 36 1.2 What is the Criminal Justice System? 37 1.3 The Cost of Justice 39 1.4 Purpose and Legitimacy 39 1.5 Hard-Pressed Clientele 43 1.6 The Goals of Reform 44 Chapter 2: Crime and Communities 46 2.1 Where are the Criminals from? 46 2.2 Victims from Deprived Communities 49 2.3 Perceptions of Crime and the Criminal 53 Justice System in Deprived Areas 2.4 Crime Affects the Poorest Most 56 2.5 The Effect of Crime on Communities 56 2.6 High Crime, Lack of Confidence 57 2.7 Cycles of Crime 60 2.8 Local Justice 60 Chapter 3: Crime and Social Breakdown 62 3.1 Who do the Magistrates See? 62 3.2 Drugs and Alcohol 63 3.3 Dealing with Social Breakdown at Court 71 Chapter 4: From Crime to Court 74 4.1 Police Justice Versus Court Justice 74 4.2 Simple, Speedy, Summary? 75 4.3 Virtual Justice 78 4.4 Proposals 79 3 Chapter 5: Community Sentences and Short Prison Sentences 80 5.1 What is a Community Order? 81 5.2 Why do we Have Probation? 82 5.3 Reoffending and Reconviction 84 5.4 Short Prison Sentences 87 Chapter 6: Sentencing: Failures and Omissions 90 6.1 Community Sentences 91 6.2 Disruptive Short Prison Sentences 96 6.3 ‘What Works’ in Sentencing? 97 6.4 Restorative Justice 99 6.5 Fines 101 6.6 Summary 102 6.7 Proposals 102 Chapter 7: Dealing with Substance-Abusing Offenders 109 7.1 Prevalence 109 7.2 The National Options: 110 Drug Rehabilitation Requirements and Alcohol Treatment Requirements 7.3 Under-Used 110 7.4 Are the Programmes Effective? 111 7.5 Not the Fault of a ‘Criminal Justice’ Approach 113 7.6 Shortcomings 114 7.7 Proposals 116 Chapter 8: Problem-Solving Courts 119 8.1 Community Justice Centres 119 8.2 Drugs Courts 122 8.3 Deferral of Sentence 126 8.4 Other People at Court 128 8.5 Proposals 129 Chapter 9: Probation and Social Support 132 9.1 Disordered Lives 132 9.2 Motivation 133 9.3 Problems of the Probation Service 135 9.4 Encouraging Rehabilitation 138 9.5 Brokerage and Continuity 139 9.6 Accountability 140 9.7 Proposals 140 Chapter 10: Mental Health 142 10.1 Mental Health Problems 142 10.2 Prevalence 143 4 10.3 Psychoses 145 10.4 Personality Disorders 150 10.5 Proposals 150 Chapter 11: The Politicisation of Crime 153 11.1 Crime as an ‘Issue’ 153 11.2 More Laws, Less Discretion 156 11.3 Effects of Interference 161 11.4 Spin Sentencing 161 11.5 Proposals 165 Chapter 12: Making Justice Local 168 12.1 What is ‘Centralisation’? 168 12.2 What was the Rationale for Centralisation? 170 12.3 What’s Wrong with Centralisation? 171 12.4 The Role of the Voluntary and Community Sector 177 12.5 Proposals 180 12.6 Conclusion 183 List of Figures 184 Bibliography 186 Glossary 190 Special Thanks 191 5 Preface Iain Duncan Smith When the Centre for Social Justice published Breakthrough Britain two years ago, we identified the five pathways to poverty: family breakdown, educational failure, economic dependency, addiction and serious personal debt. It was apparent that these problems were also pathways into crime. Every day, our criminal justice system deals with the consequences of social breakdown – the one-man crime wave who steals thousands of pounds a week to feed a heroin addiction; the domestic abuser who saw nothing but violence in his own family growing up; the young man with no qualifications who cannot get a job. When the same characters – the same individuals – appear in local courts time and time again, we must recognise there is something wrong with the system. Over the last ten years the prison population has risen by almost 30 per cent to 84,000, and the number serving community sentences has increased even more. These offenders, overwhelmingly, are from deprived communities. But what I have seen is that crime is not only a consequence of social breakdown – it is also a cause. It makes vulnerable people – potential victims – afraid to leave their houses and less likely to trust their neighbours. It stops businesses from developing. Most directly, it creates misery for millions of people each year who are burgled, attacked, defrauded or whose property is destroyed. Though it may seem counterintuitive, people in deprived communities are more likely to be victims than wealthier people, and they rightly expect that the criminal justice system will pursue the offender and sentence them appropriately. As this report shows, the criminal justice system does not live up to these expectations. Even for summary crimes, (which exclude the most serious crimes), offenders are finally sentenced an average of 20 weeks after their offence, and this is despite the fact that most of them plead guilty. Serious crime cases tried in the Crown court take still longer. Such lengthy and seemingly unnecessary delays will hardly instil confidence in the public, and particularly in the victims of the crime in question, who are waiting to see justice done. When someone finally appears in court, the system breaks down still further. Magistrates’ courts are often unable to impose the sentence they would like due to a lack of funding, and when funding is available, far too frequently the sentence is not then carried out appropriately by probation. Those who are 6 PREFACE sentenced to short prison sentences are offered very little by way of help to rehabilitate, and they are released back into the community after a few weeks or months with no supervision at all. Into this mix are added thousands of offenders with mental health problems, some extremely severe, who are cycled between the prison system and general psychiatric services, with neither taking proper responsibility or care of them until they commit a serious dangerous offence. The result is predictable – reoffending on a large scale, at levels higher than many other comparable countries. Half of all offenders released from prison on short sentences are reconvicted within two years, while about 36 per cent of those on community sentences are proven to have reoffended while serving their sentence. Yet we also know that even these appalling figures are not the whole story: the reconviction rate figures rely on police detecting offences and then deciding to charge them in court. It is clear that the real figures for reoffending are much higher than the ones published. Once in the system, the cycle continues: almost 30 per cent of those starting a community sentence have 11 or more previous cautions or convictions. These people, mostly young men, will find their lives taken over by their interaction with the justice system. This report shows that there is much public dissatisfaction with the criminal justice system, and no wonder. But its criticism goes further than a failure to subdue crime. The criminal justice system has been increasingly politicised and ‘spun’ over the last decade. There has been more political interference and more spin. It is almost impossible now to tell how long a sentence passed by a court will actually last, nor whether the reality will reflect the conditions imposed by the court. A six-month prison sentence routinely translates to six weeks: there is an automatic one-third reduction for a guilty plea (180 days to 120 days), then the remaining time is halved, and then a further 18 days are subtracted for early release (leaving 42 days). A six-week sentence can mean immediate release if it is handed down on a Friday: after all the subtractions the offender is left with three days, and there is no release on the weekend. At the same time, a national centralised bureaucracy has been put in place to control criminal justice professionals.
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