Theresa May’s Community Remedy – Victim's Choose Offender's Punishment

Home Secretary, Theresa May, told the Daily Mail that last year 272,000 cautions were handed out for anti-social behaviour and the victims of these crimes were left feeling powerless as they were excluded from the process and received no form of reparation.

She is opting to change the law to empower the victims by allowing them to get some form of reparation.  Victims of low-level crimes, such as criminal damage, would get to choose from a “menu” of punishment options that would include a form of restorative justice. This “community remedy” could see victims receiving reparation for the damages caused, for example, replacing a smashed window; if the victim does not want something directly related to them done, they could opt for the offender to do work in the community. If the offender does not accept the punishment, they would face court proceedings. The Home Secretary hopes this will boost the introduction of police and crime commissioners, when the first elections take place on November 15^th.

The Home Secretary will also announce her own review of the Human Rights Act, stating it can be replaced by a British bill of rights and responsibilities. However, this may clash with the government’s existing commission on a bill of rights that does not wish to replace the Human Rights Act.

May will also mention her intention to opt out of areas of EU police and justice co-operation, this move has been criticised by policy leaders and Liberal Democrats. She may opt out of the European arrest warrant, which is seen by police as one of the most successful instruments in European crime-fighting. Should the UK choose to opt out, they can always opt back in a later date.

Dear Mrs Home Secretary, please stop telling racist lies.

Conservative catflap: the truth behind Maya and the deportation row

Spat between two Conservative cabinet ministers rests on a judge's light-hearted remark

Theresa May Home Secretary, winging it. bad hair dye day

via @Guardian

An immigration judge's light-hearted remark about a cat no longer having to fear adapting to Bolivian mice lies behind the outlandish Conservative party conference claim by home secretary Theresa May. Her assertion that a Bolivian student was an illegal immigrant who could not be deported because he had a pet cat – called Maya – was one of three examples she cited as justifying her new drive to prevent human rights protection for family life blocking deportations.
The three examples were drawn from a Sunday Telegraph article in June which detailed 102 cases last year in which article 8 of the European convention on human rights – the right to family life – was cited as a reason for stopping the deportation of illegal migrants and foreign criminals. The other two cases involved a violent drug dealer, whose daughter lived in Britain, and a robber who was not deported because he had a British girlfriend. The paper was careful in its report to say the cat was only part of the reason that stopped the Bolivian student's deportation. May's downfall was caused by her failure to make such a qualification; she pinned the whole thing on the cat.
But the judgment delivered by senior immigration judge Gleeson on 10 December 2008 makes clear that while the cat featured in the case, it was actually a dispute about an article 8 rule then in force that said if someone was settled in Britain with an unmarried partner for more than two years without enforcement action, then they had an automatic right to stay.
Ronan Toal, the barrister in the case, told the Guardian that it wasn't even about a deportation but an application to stay in Britain and the cat had only been mentioned in passing as evidence of the long-term relationship.
"It's totally cynical. It's specious to rely on a completely distorted and inaccurate account of one decision of one tribunal. If that's the best they can do, then that just reveals the poverty of their thinking about human rights in general and article 8 in particular,'' he said.
The judgment makes clear that the joint ownership of the cat was not the crucial factor in allowing the appeal.
The original judgment does not name the cat. Indeed, it goes as far as to omit the cat's name, which led the Sun to print a picture of a cat with its eyes blacked out when it reported the story. It appears that Judge Gleeson's throw-away line at the end of his judgment "that the cat need no longer fear having to adapt to Bolivian mice" may have fuelled some of the tabloid myths that have stemmed from the case.
At a later appeal, when the cat was named as Maya, the Home Office argued that too much weight had been given at the earlier hearing on the impact on the student of having to return to Bolivia and leave behind not only his partner but also the jointly owned cat. May was relying on this last night to but even she conceded that the ruling was only "in part" based on the man's ownership of a cat called Maya.
No wonder Ken Clarke was prepared to offer Theresa May good money on Tuesday that nobody's deportation had been refused by the courts solely because they owned a pet cat.

Time to turn feminist Mr Justice Secretary? Theresa May get your Marigolds on.

More tosh ( nasty internal spinning from MoJ policy resistant wonks) about what The Justice Secretary is meant to have said about women and incarceration.

It doesn't tally at all with what he says privately, he conceeds women are "far more messed up than men" when they get to prison and the the prisons "don't know what to do with them". So how does that justify locking them up , when diversion sentences are more successful in cutting reoffending and clearly more cost-effective?

Released from behind the Times paywall.

Mary Bowers and Richard Ford

Last updated June 3 2011 12:01AM

 

Kenneth Clarke, the Justice Secretary, is set to reject calls to speed up the closure of women’s prisons, in a blow to penal reformers who want thousands of female offenders to be spared jail. He is also to ignore demands to appoint a “women’s justice champion” with the task of ensuring that the specific needs of female offenders are at the heart of his department’s work.

Mr Clarke’s rebuff to penal reformers will fuel their fears that women offenders are being marginalised in sentencing reforms to be outlined later this month.A report to be published next week is to call for far-reaching reform of justice, with a switch of emphasis away from imprisoning women to developing community-based alternatives.

But Mr Clarke’s insistence that there will be no swift moves to close women’s prisons and his robust response to penal reform groups will delight those Conservative MPs who believe he is soft on crime.
Cuts in police numbers, along with sentencing reforms intended to stabilise and then reduce the prison population, are provoking fears that the coalition is soft on law and order.

David Cameron will seek to reassure the public and his party that the Government has a tough approach to crime when he makes a speech on law and order later this month. He will speak shortly before Mr Clarke unveils proposals to overhaul sentencing, including plans to divert men and women suffering from mental health, drug and alcohol abuse away from the criminal justice system and to health facilities for treatment.
Penal reformers claim that thousands of female criminals currently jailed for non-violent crimes should not be sent to jail but punished in the community.

The latest figures show that just under 45 per cent of women sent to jail in 2009 were convicted of theft, fraud and forgery offences, compared with 21 per cent of men. Just 14 per cent of women jailed were convicted of violence against the person, compared with 21 per cent of men.

Andrew Neilson, assistant director of the Howard League for Penal Reform, said that Mr Clarke could take steps to reduce the number of women in jail without alarming the public.

“He could target this area as a way of reducing the prison population. Cutting the number of women in prison is much easier to sell to the public than men, particularly as so many women are in prison for non-violent crimes.”

Penal reform groups believe that the momentum for reforming the way women are dealt with in the justice system has slowed since Labour lost the general election. Under Labour, there was a female prisons minister who also championed women’s justice.

There are also fears over the future funding for a network of pioneering centres set up to help overhaul the way female offenders are treated. They were seen as the core element of a strategy to keep women out of prison and able to remain in their communities.

The Government gave £15.6 million over four years to trial centres around the country when they were piloted in 2007. Last month, the Government added £1.7 million to the £1.5 million provided by charities to ensure the survival of 26 centres, after fears that several were facing closure.

Crispin Blunt, the Prisons Minister, made clear that the Justice Ministry contribution was a “one-off” and there are fears that charities will be unwilling or unable to bear the financial burden of keeping the centres open.
Early findings from the centres suggest that they have a better record of turning women away from a life of crime. Anawim centre in Birmingham reported last year that 3 per cent of women using the unit had reoffended, compared to 54 per cent of those in jail.

The centres also represent a much cheaper and more effective way of dealing with female offenders. It costs, on average, about £54,000 to keep a woman in prison for a year compared with between £10,000-15,000 for a community order.

A Ministry of Justice official said last night that the Government remained committed to developing policies addressing the particular needs of women offenders.