Steve Brine attended a special breakfast hosted by the Howard League for Penal Reform on Tuesday 5th February, looking at the effectiveness of prison terms and community sentencing.
A new pamphlet, Intelligent Justice, has been published by professors Stephen Farrall, Mike Hough and Fergus McNeill, three leading criminologists who have drawn evidence from the United States where research has shown that imprisoning a large number of people for longer periods causes crime to fall in the short term but rise in the long term when they are eventually released.
The pamphlet states that prison's effect of deterring people from committing crime can be overestimated. The key factor which prevents most people from offending is how likely they are to be punished, rather than how severe the punishment is.
Speaking afterwards, Steve, a key member of the influential Justice Select Committee, said: "This was a fascinating event and a useful discussion, even at that time of the morning.
"As always, I was keen to press the whole subject of crime diversion and keeping young people out of the criminal justice system in the first place. Successive governments have not addressed this issue comprehensively and we are paying a terrible price for it."
Frances Crook, Chief Executive of the Howard League for Penal Reform, said: "The prison population in England and Wales has more than doubled since the mid 1990s and the trend of ever-rising prison numbers is unsustainable in the face of current cuts to public spending. This paper provides a framework for new thinking that might provide an escape from the current crisis.
"Ultimately this means acknowledging the complex nature of desistance from crime and deciding what we want from our penal system. Successive governments have promoted the purpose of punishment and reform without acknowledging the very real tensions between these two principles.
"Simply put, the further we remove people from the ways and means and reasons to live as we want them to live, the harder we make it for people to avoid reoffending. The current focus on high reconviction rates would strongly suggest we have failed to strike the right balance."
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