Take a bow, Michael Howard!

Yesterday James Kirkup, its political correspondent but in the Law and Order section, penned an article in the Daily Telegraph which must be of concern.

Between April 2006 and April 2008 offenders serving community sentences and suspended sentences were convicted of 121 numbers. In addition they committed 1,004 serious crimes, including 22 attempted murders, 103 rapes and 682 other serious or sexual offences. (A further 374 alleged offences by offenders in the community have yet to come to court.)

At 31st December 2007 the Probation service was supervising 242,720 offenders , an increase of 3% on the previous year, an increase of 6,000 in one year.

Let us hear for the defence:
The Ministry of Justice claims that the vast majority of such offenders had been committed originally for relatively minor offences, with no indication that they would commit more serious crimes while on probation.

Harry Fletcher, assistant general secretary of NAPO, the probation officers' union pointed out that many of the people they are dealing with have mental health problems or drug or alcohol addiction, and so further offending is unavoidable.

For the prosecution:
Is the situation that there are so many offenders, and so little prison accommodation, that there is pressure on judges and magistrates to use non-custodial sentences, and pressure on prisons to release offenders when they have served only a relatively small part of their sentence?

If the government and penal reformers ( and general do-gooders) wish to keep offenders out of prison, is it not incumbent upon them to provide resources in prison building and in dealing with offenders while in prison, to prevent this sort of thing happening. We are having "prison on the cheap" and "probation on the cheap".

While the argument that many offenders have personality defects, mental health problems or addictions is valid, that will not weigh very heavily with families who have lost loved ones or whose members have suffered serious assault. We ought to provide resources for better psychological and medical assessment of offenders, and more probation staff to carry the increasing workload.

We rightly search for good reasons for keeping people out of prison, - provocation, social conditions, childhood experience, etc. This involves expensive expert judgement. Why do we not spend similar attention to decide whether an offender is a risk to society if he may be given a non-custodial sentence?

In two years 121 murders occurred, which is about 10% of all murders, or about one per week on average. This is a sad reflection of the nature of society, and perhaps an even sadder reflection on our under-resourced penal service.