Talk given by Helen Judge, Criminal Law, Sentencing & Youth Justice
Policy Director at the Ministry of Justice, who spoke about developments in sentencing policy at the November 2009 council meeting.
She began by saying that overall there had been some important achievements in
recent years – crime overall was down, re-offending in the youth and adult courts was
down and figures for first-time entrants to the youth justice system show in the last
year a further fall of 21% in the number of people coming into the youth justice
system for the first time. She believed that this was down to the early intervention
work the government was doing and a lot of activity the police were doing around the
country on informal diversion schemes for young people. She said that there were a
great many statistics being produced by the Ministry of Justice and hoped that in time
it would become possible for all partners in the criminal justice system to have a
shared set of statistics so that everyone is aware of the trends and can have a shared
discussion on what the trends are showing.
She spoke about out of court disposals and said it was largely down to the chairman
and the Association that the Justice Secretary had recognised the need for a review of
how they were being used at local level.
She believed there was an appetite amongst members of the public to understand
more about what is happening and how sentencing decisions are made and keeping
the public informed was a priority and one of the duties of the Sentencing Council.
The Youth Rehabilitation Order which was shortly to be launched represented a
significant change to youth sentencing – creating a youth equivalent to the community
orders used in adult courts and enabling youth magistrates to combine a series of
different requirements according to the needs of the offender and the offence. At the
same time the Youth Justice Board were launching their scaled approach which is a
risk assessment based approach to their advice on sentencing for young people
which will inform their pre-sentence report.
Jeff Branch (Berkshire) asked what work was being done to ensure that all the
requirements under the Youth Rehabilitation Orders would be available to sentencers,
in particular intensive fostering.
Jenny Clarke (South Yorkshire) reported that having just done her youth court
training, she has been told by the Youth Offending Team that they can’t address
alcohol, drugs, education or homelessness in that area. Mary Duff (Chairman, Youth
Courts Committee) echoed these concerns. Helen acknowledged the concern and
suggested it would be helpful to have national feedback on what is not available
where. Mary Duff agreed to take this back to the Youth Courts Committee to discuss
how this could be done.
Responding to the query from Chris Stanley (Kent), Helen Judge explained that
section 9 of the Criminal Justice & Immigration Act, which introduces the principles
and purposes of sentencing for young people, is not being implemented. The
principle aims of the youth justice system, ie reducing offending and the need to have
regard to the welfare of the offender, remain but it had come to the attention of the
Justice Secretary that the explicit exclusion of deterrent as one of the purposes of
sentencing for young people (as it is for adult offenders) could send out the wrong
signal and he will look to amend the legislation at the first opportunity.
Fred Manning (Nottingham) doubted the accuracy of the recorded crime figures
which had been quoted at the beginning of the presentation.
John Howson (Deputy Chairman) hoped that the review of out of court disposals
would consider changing the name of Penalty Notice for Disorder to simply Penalty
Notices as most of them were not issued for disorder. He also hoped that the review
would take into account the guidelines for Chief Constables and what he called the
third tier police force, ie the extension of the power to issue PNDs to people who were
not warranted or under police control.
Helen Judge acknowledged the concern about the accuracy of crime figures recorded
by the police and agreed to make further enquiries about how different forces made
decisions about what to record.
Chris Stanley (Kent) said that whilst magistrates were encouraged to make more use
of fines, in certain circumstances they were not considered as punishment. He gave
an example of repeated fines being given to an offender who could only pay them at a
small amount per week and the time was simply extended for subsequent fines.
Simon Wolfensohn (Wiltshire) reported that his Chief Constable had said he only
wanted to see a certain percentage of cases going to court, the rest being handled by
out of court disposals and he asked if the police were being given targets in this way.
Russ Watson (Northampton) pointed out that there was already guidance on out of
court disposals and there was little point in issuing further guidance without enforcing
compliance.
Helen responded to these questions by saying that fines clearly had a place but it was
up to sentencers to decide the most appropriate sentence in each case. Chief
Constables used to have a target for the number of offences brought to justice which
could have led to the over-use of out of court disposals but they no longer had that
target and did not have a target for the number of cases going to court.
Concerning compliance with guidance on out of court disposals, that was to be a
major part of the review of out of court disposals.
The chairman thanked her very much for coming to speak to Council and for her
willingness to engage with magistrates.