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Penal System

I am very happy to call the person a child, a youth or whatever the hon. Gentleman chooses. I just note the fact that they are under 18. Therefore, for many of us they are children and they need to be treated as children, even if they are extremely badly behaved children who need particular measures to put them straight. They are still not beyond redemption, although some might take the view that they are. I want to finish now, because this is a short debate. If those various measures were put in place, we could see a substantial and sustained reduction in the prison population. We need more research on the subject of early release. I am aware that the Lord Chancellor recently received correspondence from a professor of criminology saying precisely that. He has a point: we do not have a proper research base for the different options available for early release. That needs to be put into effect through controlled trials. We need more active management of the prison estate. We seem to accept that some of the hugely inefficient and inappropriate Victorian prisons in the centres of cities are still the right way of keeping prisoners, even if they happen to be in the wrong places, to be very expensive and to occupy extremely expensive pieces of land that could be sold for redevelopment. I would like much more active management of the prison estate, so that we can get the most appropriate accommodation in the right places and get rid of some of the large Victorian buildings that have outlived their usefulness as prisons. My final point touches on what I think the hon. Member for Arundel and South Downs was trying to say earlier—there was a little crossfire between the two Front Benches—about what the length of time served in a sentence means. I have long advocated honesty in sentencing and I will continue to do so. It is long overdue and is important to the public attitude towards the criminal justice system. That does not mean that the Executive should have no discretion in the system, but it does mean that judges should construct sentences so that there is a clear term that is going to be served and the public understand that. There should also be an additional term that will be served if there is not appropriate behaviour on the part of the prisoner. Instead of having x minus y, we would have x plus y. If the system made it clear that a prison sentence of a certain duration meant precisely that, the public would have much more confidence in our system and would believe that justice was being done. At the moment I do not believe that they have any such confidence, and the events of the past few weeks have served to undermine that confidence still further.