Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill

I am most grateful to the noble Earl—at least we did not have Genghis Khan this time. The suggestion that we get together and consider whether the amendments can constructively form a new clause to put in place of the present Clause 9 is one that I shall follow. I was reminiscing about my experiences as a recorder when the noble Earl intervened. I wanted to give noble Lords a feeling for the mindset of those who deal with offenders when they are young. The first object is to get that person to take a different course. One learns of the familial cycles—father, son, grandfather—where members of the same family constantly turn up in court. In my time, I have certainly dealt with two generations, if not three. Generally speaking, such a young person under the age of 18 has an ill developed or malformed sense of right and wrong. The Minister and others have said that most people know what is right and wrong. That is not true. In some deprived families, there is a moral climate in which dishonesty is a way of life. Getting the better of other people is what life is about, and violence is accepted. That applies not just to the members of the family itself but to the peers of the young person, the gangs that roam around and, for example, steal mobile phones. What one finds with people under 18 is a lack of example from people who can show them that there is a better way of life. In sentencing young people, the first thought that comes into one’s mind is whether there is any way of turning this person from a life of crime. When a convicted offender comes before you, the barrister who is representing him will talk about what a terrible time he had as a child and will go into all those issues. By the time that person is 19, 20 or 21 and has been through all the processes—probation, what used to be borstal, youth offending or whatever—you have to say, ““Tough. Society cannot deal with you in any other way except to lock you up, if the offence is serious enough, for its own protection. You have had your chances; you have not changed your ways; all sorts of interventions have been tried in an attempt to deal with you. We are sorry that you had a bad time as a child, but you have to take responsibility and face up to the consequences and disagreeable sanctions””. I think that that was the definition of punishment for which the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, was striving. However, there is a stage before that. In dealing with someone who is under 18, we are hoping that we can reform and rehabilitate them and set the boundaries to which the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, referred. It is not punishment that will set boundaries for young people; it is encouragement, the teaching of values, the providing of leadership and of role models, so that the young person appreciates that they do not have to engage in crime. They do not have to follow their family or their peers. For those reasons, I totally agree with the noble Lord, Lord Kingsland, when he poses the question to which we have really had no answer: how do the purposes set out in Clause 9 differ from the way in which the purposes of sentencing are applied to adults? There should be a difference. There is a possibility of reform and rehabilitation. It is not enough to say that everybody understands punishment and that society wreaks vengeance on those who offend against its tenets. The public have to be protected, but we know that, for young people, detention and prison are failing; punishment in that sense is not working. It is not working because detention and imprisonment—we have said this so many times, but it is worth saying it at every opportunity—do not provide the facilities, because of overcrowding, that teach people who are locked up about values and give them the leadership that they require. The noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, also took issue, to a much lesser extent, with the proposal that the sentencing court should ascertain the wishes and feelings of the child. For many years, I have referred in the House to the children’s panels in Scotland as a much more constructive way of dealing with young people. You are involving, in a far less formal way, the children who are at risk and their parents and are trying to work out, with them, what their problems are and how they can best be addressed. The way in which we approach juvenile crime in this country, by a lower-level system of courts, is not good enough. We need much more of the children’s panel system which is that much more successful in Scotland. I say that not because of my Scottish connections or because my noble friend Lady Linklater is sitting next to me. It is because the statistics show that the system works better by preventing reoffending to a greater degree and permitting children to break out of that cycle. The noble Lord, Lord Hunt, says that we have to have punishment because people understand the concept. What I am always looking for from a Government of any hue is leadership to educate the public that there is a better way of dealing with young people than locking them up. We should not be paying heed to the cries of the popular press; we should be educating, not following, public opinion in this most important area.