Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill

The noble Lord has as usual made a powerful contribution, but there are two questions that I hope that he will answer in his final remarks. He seemed to indicate earlier that, when he had been a recorder, he had struggled with the issue of how you rescued somebody from a life of crime and said that, when you had tried this and tried that, you came to a point at which you had to say, ““Well, sorry, you may have had a hell of an upbringing, a hell of an experience, but nothing’s worked, and the only possibility is to put you away””. Does the noble Lord not really believe that he should say, ““The point has been reached at which we have to try a more disciplined approach to your rehabilitation than has perhaps been possible by all the other means, and, therefore, we are taking you into custody to have an intensive course””? That is what we should strive at. The other element of what the noble Lord said raises a wider and more contentious debate, but it underlies a lot of our position. I remember listening to a very senior policeman of a very enlightened hue, who said, ““The trouble is that, if you live in a society in which the social mores of the successful are greed, short cuts, getting what you can without being too squeamish about how you’ve done it, where is your moral authority to appeal to those at the bottom of the pile? Where is your credibility when you start talking about the threat to society and saying that we must therefore lock someone up?”” I do not say it lightly, and I am sure that the concept of hypocrisy means little to many of the youngsters with whom we are concerned, but we are often seen as a pretty hypocritical society.