We made a submission, earlier this month, to the Independent Sentencing Review, chaired by the former Lord Chancellor, Rt Hon David Gauke.
The Review, established last year by the Labour government, is looking at sentencing trends, different sentencing options, and the use of technology in sentencing, among other things.
Our submission contained ten recommendations covering seven themes:
- Trends in sentencing
- Reducing unnecessary imprisonment
- Better use of electronic monitoring
- Reforming the use of short prison sentences
- Sentence progression
- Tackling the problem of recall to prison
- Joint enterprise prosecutions
In our section on sentencing trends, we point out that twice as many community sentences as prison sentences were imposed by the courts in 2005. by 2024, the courts were issuing more prison sentences than community sentences.
Given this, we are recommending that urgent work be done to rebalance sentencing away from unnecessary prison sentences and towards community sentences.
We also point to the dramatic increase in longer sentences – sentences of over 15 years in length increase in use by 425 per cent between 2010 and 2024 – while the use of shorter prison sentences have declined. Given this, we called for steps to be taken to reduce the use of long prison sentences and shorten prison sentences more generally.
While our submission recognises that sentencing policy “is, rightly, a political issue”, we also call for a cross-party consensus on the way forward.
Elsewhere in our submission we recommend a balanced and proportionate approach to the use of electronic monitoring, and concerted attempts to address the problem of released prisoners being returned to prison (so called recall), often for minor breaches of their release conditions.
We point out, for instance, that in 1993 there were probably fewer than 100 prisoners in custody having been recalled. By June 2024 this had grown to more than 12,000. Our submission recommends detailed action to address this massive increase.
The Independent Sentencing Review is due to report on its findings to the Lord Chancellor by Spring 2025.
