UK Parliament / Open data

Rehabilitation and Sentencing

I do not think that they will make any difference, really—[Interruption.] No, do not start misquoting me. If the right hon. Member for Tooting (Sadiq Khan) cannot find anything that I have actually said to disagree with, I hope that he will not start misquoting me in order to find something to disagree with. I would need to work through those 2,000 cases, and my first question would be to ask what the further offence was that they were up for. I am sure it was not parking. People who have previously committed a crime do not always get sent to prison again, and the first thing we have to ask is how serious is the matter for which they are now before the courts again. I hate to cast doubt on my hon. Friend's statistics, but a lot of the statistics used across this whole field as the basis for these arguments are hopelessly unreliable. We are not reducing punishment for serious crime, and we are not letting anybody out of prison. We are using prison as a punishment, and trying to prevent the kind of people that he has described from reoffending over and over again, because that is in the public interest.
Type
Proceeding contribution
Reference
520 c186 
Session
2010-12
Chamber / Committee
House of Commons chamber
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