Sir John Hayes

“Disraeli, the great Conservative Prime Minister, said: “Justice is truth in action.”—[Hansard’s Parliamentary Debates, 11 February 1851; Vol. 114, c. 412.] When criminal justice deviates from what the public see as the truth, the faith in its delivery is undermined. People want to see that justice is done and seen to be done, and that punishments for wickedness are dealt with appropriately. I take a different view from the Minister about the character of a retributive approach to criminal justice, as I do think that retribution is an important part of satisfying a legitimate public thirst for appropriateness—that is to say, when something awful is done, people expect the person responsible for that horror to be treated accordingly. They do not take the view, which has prevailed for successive decades affecting all kinds of Governments, that we should, in the first place, treat the criminal as though suffering from an illness. The treatmentist approach has dominated thinking on criminal justice for most of my lifetime is out of tune with popular sentiment. The truth is that crime is not an illness to be treated; it is a perverse choice by those seeking to gain from it. That might be financial or, in the case of sexual crime, about lust. When we speak of wickedness, let us be straightforward: these kinds of instincts have been endemic in humankind since we fell from the state of grace, so we should not assume that people are not capable of the worst horrors—all of human history shows that they are. When that occurs, people expect those who exercise power to deal with it emphatically, without fear or favour. We need a criminal justice system that defends the innocent and punishes the guilty, and I make no apologies in making a case for punishment. People should be punished when they do awful, wicked things, so I want to see more people locked up for much longer. I do not think I am out of tune with my constituents, because I think they would say exactly the same. What we actually have is public policy that is taking us in exactly the opposite direction. We are seeing people sentenced and, as though that sentence is meaningless, then serving half of it. What is the purpose of a judge agreeing a sentence when the victims of the crime know that the person responsible for it will only serve half the time that the judge insists is necessary for punishment to be done? Early release will not just affect minor criminals; we have heard from Members across the Chamber that it will be applied to people of all types. When my right hon. Friend the Member for New Forest East (Sir Julian Lewis) asked for clarification about numbers, answer was there none. We do not know how many of those who will be released remarkably early are likely to pose a considerable danger to my constituents, the Minister’s and my right hon. Friend’s. I was not generous but accurate in describing the Minister as a decent man, and I think the least he owes us is, before the debate concludes—he can get a message sent to him from on high, by which I mean the Box over there, not from God—to be precise about the number of people in each of the categories that have been described today who will be released early. How many people convicted of manslaughter, how many child sexual offenders and how many rapists will now be on the streets as a result of this policy? The Minister has come to the House and said, “This is a matter of practicality because there are insufficient prison places to hold all those there.” We know that there are two reasons for that beyond the desire to lock people up. One is the number of foreign national offenders in our prisons, so let us have some clarity about the number of those who are being deported. Is the number increasing dramatically, and if not, what are the impediments to those offenders returning to their country of origin? Secondly, there are large numbers of prisoners on remand because the throughput of the courts is insufficient. How many people are on remand? How long have they been in prison? What steps will the Government take to improve the throughput in our court system that allows fewer of those people to be clogging up our prisons? We have to assume that some of them are innocent; not everyone who is on remand will later be found guilty, so there may be innocent people in prison, but we are going to let guilty people—we know they are guilty, because they have already been sentenced—free. That seems to me to be entirely inappropriate.”