Cameron defends plan to jail fewer criminals

DAVID CAMERON yesterday defended proposals by British Justice Secretary Kenneth Clarke to imprison fewer criminals and to issue more community sentences.

The British prime minister said the coalition government had been forced to take radical action to deal with the “complete mess” that Labour had made of the criminal justice system.

Defending the reforms at Prime Minister’s Question Time, Mr Cameron said 40% of prisoners released in Britain were back in jail within a year, while “more than half of them are on drugs”.

The prison reform plans follow the government’s announcement last month of proposals to close 103 magistrates’ courts and 54 county courts in England and Wales, which the justice ministry says are underused and inadequate.

Cameron denied that the Government had abandoned the “prison works” philosophy of the former Conservative home secretary Michael Howard.

“I believe that prison can work, it is just not working properly at the moment. If ever there was a part of our public services that needed radical reform to make sure prison does work, that’s it” he said.

However, there was widespread anger among Tory MPs after Clarke used his first major speech as Justice Secretary to question the value of “banging up more and more people”, suggesting it was a throwback to the Victorian era.

He said that sending offenders to jail often proved to be a “costly and ineffectual approach that fails to turn criminals into law-abiding citizens” and called for “intelligent sentencing” with a greater focus on rehabilitation.

Tory backbencher Philip Davies warned that Clarke was out of step with ordinary Conservative supporters who voted for the party at the general election.

“Lots of Conservative supporters, whether they be in Parliament or voters, will feel very disappointed by this announcement,” he said.

“Disappointed because I think lots of them will feel that it’s the wrong thing to do, but also disappointed because many of them voted for the Conservative Party at the last election on the basis that we would send more people to prison, not fewer.”

Shadow justice secretary Jack Straw accused Clarke of a return to the “hand-wringing” approach to law and order of Howard’s Conservative predecessors as Home Secretary – including Clarke himself.

“He (Howard) deserves credit for turning the tide, as does the opposition leader at that time, Tony Blair, who encapsulated the need for a balanced policy with his call to be ‘tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime’,” he said in an article for the Daily Mail.