Sometimes being in Government can be pretty miserable. Home Office ministers would have had a pretty ghastly couple of days with the public relations disaster, when a deportee on their one-in-one-out scheme with France returned on the first available dinghy.
Equally, the Secretary of State for Justice would have had a ghastly weekend with the mistaken release of Hadush Kebatu, the sex-offender from the controversial Epping asylum hotel, who was also due for deportation. Kebatu tried to return to the prison 5 times, but instead they sent him packing to the railway station.
I’ve never believed that ministers should take the blame for the incompetence of operatives. Ministers are responsible for policy, not for every operational matter.
I recall the occasion in 1997 when BBC’s Robert Paxman badgered Michael Howard, then the Home Secretary, after a mass escape from HMP Parkhurst. It was gripping television which saw a new departure in the treatment of politicians by interviewers, but it wasn’t fair.
Repeatedly Howard stressed his responsibility for policy and that operational matters were for Prison Governors.
So, I don’t believe that we should dwell on the discomfort of ministers over what was an operational blunder. Instead let’s confine ourselves to consideration of the Government’s policy.
On Wednesday the Sentencing Bill completed its Commons stages.
As ministers were saying how livid they were, and demanding maximum resources to recapture kebatu, they were, at the same time, pushing a bill through Parliament which will see hundreds of offenders just like kebatu, the dregs of society that wreck the lives of women and girls, avoid prison altogether. The Irony is that if Kebatu had committed his crime after this bill had passed into law, he wouldn’t have gone to prison in the first place.
The Government insists that the measure is forced on to it by a shortage of prison places. In which case the Bill should contain a sunset clause to be invoked once sufficient new capacity, already in the pipeline, has been delivered.
At the same time, the Government prays-in-aid David Gauke’s sentencing review, which claimed that short sentences don’t work anyway; that they increase reoffending, and that they should be replaced by community sentences.
I’m not convinced that they can have it both ways.
It ought to have occurred to Ministers that a remedy for the shortcomings of short sentences might be to make them longer.
To be fair, I do understand the issues that arise from short sentences: loss of employment, loss of accommodation, disruption to family, all rendering the offender without a support network on release from prison. Clearly there are offences and offenders who might be better suited to a community sentence. But sex offenders like Kebatu ought never to be among them