Iain Duncan Smith: Tough community sentences are not about being ‘soft’ on criminals

Rt Hon Sir Iain Duncan Smith MP is a former leader of the Conservative Party and Chairman of the Centre for Social Justice. 

No crime feels “minor” when you are the victim of it.

Whether you are a small business being targeted by shoplifters or living in a neighbourhood blighted by anti-social behaviour, these crimes can feel anything but “minor”.

The community sentencing option outlined in a new paper from the Centre for Social Justice – the Intensive Control and Rehabilitation Order (ICRO) – is not about being softer on criminals, far from it. It is a custodial sentence of a different kind, which can come with a barrage of conditions attached. But it does ask if we can be more creative about the conditions of a sentence to try and reduce the chances of crime from happening in the first place.

For example, a huge amount of acquisitive crime like shoplifting is driven by drug and alcohol addiction. Prison is rarely a good place to overcome these problems, indeed a significant proportion of prisoners go in clean and come out with a new addiction. But a community sentence with tight controls might give the chance to impose a condition of rehabilitation and the potential to reduce reoffending in the long term.

Similarly, prison can take a vandal off the streets for a few months, which is sometimes welcome and needed for the communities affected. But it rarely has a long-term reformative impact on low level antisocial behaviour. Measures such as alcohol monitoring and GPS tagging, enabling the police to place an offender at any given location, at any time, may act as a real deterrent.

In addition to all that, a prison sentence will sometimes remove an individual from stable housing, employment and relationships– the very things most needed to reduce recidivism. Overnight, we can turn a taxpayer into a £50,000 per year burden on the state finances, without a home, employment, or any promise they will leave prison a reformed character. Punishment must remain a part of the system, but it should be the offender, not ourselves that we are punishing.

This is absolutely not a license to release every, indeed any, murderer, rapist, and terrorist onto the streets of Britain. But what it does seek to do, where there is no threat to public, and prison will have little reformative effect, is give the judiciary another weapon in their arsenal to drive down reoffending and reduce the boomerang in and out of prison.

The title of the CSJ’s new report – All Options – refers to the decision-making process of the judiciary when passing sentence. They will often refer to all options being open before passing a sentence. But the reality is that many judges feel their options are pretty limited. We have heard time and time again during the compilation of this paper that options are often binary, insufficient, or incapable of driving the required change in behaviours. This sentencing option, the ICRO, could change that.

There is also an opportunity here.

Previous governments have toyed with different kinds of community sentences for decades, but never fully grasped the nettle. Well, necessity is the mother of invention – with our prisons overflowing and little prospect of new places coming on lines for years yet, better community sentencing is the necessary option as well as the right one for some cases.

Far from being politically difficult, exclusive polling done for this report has found that strict community sentences for low-level offending are popular with the public – nearly three quarters of people back such sentences.

As the Government’s review of sentencing reports in the weeks ahead, it would do well to grasp that nettle and realise that the opportunity here is not just to relieve the over-crowding in our prisons, but to drive down re-offending and release the potential in our prisoners.