UK To Transfer Funding From Prisons To Programmes

UK Politicians To Transfer Funding From Prisons To Programmes, - Rethinking Crime And Punishment

In a ground breaking report, UK MP's have recommended that the prison population should be cut by a third with thousands of criminals given community punishments in an effort to stop them reoffending. Courts should regard sending offenders to jail as a last resort.

Kim Workman, of Rethinking Crime and Punishment says. “This report should be read by every New Zealand MP, for two reasons. Firstly, we are facing the same issues in New Zealand that they are facing in the UK. WE all know that development of the prison estate is neither effective, nor economically sustainable. Secondly, if we move quickly enough, we can develop strategies which will reinvest justice funding toward more cost effective measures.”

The report, “Cutting Crime: The Case For Reinvestment”, calls for millions of pounds to be diverted from prisons to programmes aimed at rehabilitating offenders and getting addicts off drugs and alcohol. According to the report, the UK cross-party Committee have recommended this “justice reinvestment”, because:

• The different parts of the criminal justice system were not pursuing the same goals;

• The government’s main answer to current overcrowding was to provide more accommodation rather than to address root causes;

• Issues that needed to be addressed included sensationalist reporting by the media; over-politicization of criminal justice policy since the 1980’s, an over punitive public, and the impact of all those factors on sentencing judges.

• It was also clear that agencies outside the criminal justice system could take more effective action than Corrections to reduce both the number of people entering the criminal justice system in the first place and the likelihood of re-entry after serving a sentence

“Justice reinvestment” approaches—which channel resources on a geographically-targeted basis to reduce the crimes which bring people into the criminal justice system and into prison in particular—offered potential solutions to these challenges.

ENDS

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