Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill

My Lords, the clear purpose of the provision in the Bill is to reduce the prison population. That is a laudable objective, but I have the gravest doubts about whether that can be achieved by the risk that the Government are taking with regard to this provision. Indeed, in all likelihood it will have the opposite effect. I referred in Committee and I will do so again to what happened in the Home Office 40 years ago when I was a junior Minister, which rather dates one. A careful analysis was carried out of the effect of suspended sentences under the Criminal Justice Act 1967 after the Act had been in force for 12 months or so. The objective of the Act, among many other things, was to try to reduce the number of prison sentences. The figures were something like this. The number of prison sentences remained exactly the same. The number of fines fell by about 18,000. The number of suspended sentences was about 18,000. In other words, one could never prognosticate nor indeed have any confidence in exactly how courts, particularly magistrates’ courts, will react to such a situation. That is in no way pejorative of magistrates’ courts. There are petty sessional divisions that are apparently very similar socially but that have entirely different sentencing policies. There is therefore every likelihood that the ironic consequence of this provision will be to increase the prison population rather than reduce it. There is one other reason why this clause should not be allowed to proceed. There is real merit in having the power to suspend for relatively innocuous offences, or let us say offences that are not of the highest rank of seriousness. Like so many other sentencers, I have often looked at a person’s antecedents and seen how he or she was dealt with most leniently four, six or eight times before, and then seen a chasm where a very serious sentence had suddenly to be imposed. One often wonders what would have happened to that person if a shot across the bows by way of a suspended sentence had been fired much earlier in their criminal career. As for the logic of the situation, much as I respect the normally unremitting and perfect logic of the noble Lord, Lord Kingsland, I think that one might make this distinction. In so far as there is reference to crossing the threshold of custody and whether the case merits imprisonment, that is a decision for a sentencing court. Of course the decision whether one suspends a sentence is a decision for the sentencing court by definition; but actually it is a sentencing court sitting as a parole board. It has already sent the person to prison in its mind, and then one second later it reconstitutes itself as a parole board and asks whether it is necessary for that sentence to be served. I think that there is that justification for what might seem a matter of rather slick mental gymnastics. I simply ask the Minister—who has been most accommodating on all the points raised on the Bill—to consider that the Government might be wrong on this matter and that an unnecessary risk is being run.