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Rehabilitation and Sentencing

I acknowledge the experience of the noble Lord in these areas, but his little catalogue at the end was just the kind of fear and alarm about these issues that we have heard. We have to ask whether if what he said is so, perhaps we should double the prison numbers again. I think that I have mentioned previously in the House that I once went to a talk given by Ronald Regan’s former prison adviser, which I think was at about the same time as the noble Lord was Home Secretary. He estimated that the proper size of Britain’s prison population should be about 170,000, because that would, as the noble Lord suggests, get all the offenders out of harm’s way. But it does not seem to remove public concern about crime. It does not seem to address this issue of re-offending. We are not going to deal lightly with knife crime, as the Statement makes clear, but neither are we going to put every juvenile who is found to be carrying a knife into prison. That would be absurd. There are other things in his litany that would go. To listen to some, one would think that next Friday, Ken Clarke is going to throw open the gates of the prison and usher out the first 3,000 who want to leave. If anyone reads the Green Paper, they will see a measured response that does not ignore the fact that there will be other things that will come into play quite often. As the noble Lord and others with experience know, addressing this is often like trying to solve a Rubik’s Cube; when you get one bit of it right, you look round the other side to see that that has gone wrong. Within the paper there are some innovative, and, I hope, optimistic views of the way we can approach this situation which may make some of the noble Lord’s pessimistic predictions wrong. As always, we will have to wait and see.