Bill to ease pressure on prisons

The government has published plans for tougher community punishments and a restriction on the use of suspended sentences.

The Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill is to seek the "smart use of prison", the Ministry of Justice says, as it tries to reduce re-offending and cope with jail overcrowding.

Last week justice secretary Lord Falconer outlined a range of measures to deal with the pressure on the prison service as the jail population exceeds its 80,000 capacity, including the early release of some non-violent offenders.

The legislation is a further part of the strategy to use more community service orders for lesser offences and jail more serious offenders for longer.

"We will focus our resources where they are most effective and ensure we can properly protect the public from dangerous individuals, rehabilitate offenders and reduce re-offending through restricting the use of suspended sentence orders," a government source said.

"We will ensure there are prison places for those that ought to be there and that the courts have tough community sentences at their disposal to deal with less serious non-violent offences."

The Bill also proposes the use of conditional cautions for young offenders and a new youth rehabilitation order designed to keep young people out of jail.

Other measures also include tougher sentences for people caught in possession of extreme pornography and greater powers for the police to tackle anti-social behaviour.

However shadow home affairs minister Edward Garnier said: "The government is being disingenuous in the extreme if it is trying to spin that reducing the amount of suspended sentences will lead to less people going to jail.

"The choice facing magistrates is custody -whether it be now or later - or community sentences. If you take away the option of custody later, in most cases, it will be replaced with custody now.

"As for supposed tougher community sentences we've heard this all before. Community sentences can work but only if they are rigorously enforced.

"Under this government this has not happened. Re-offending rates for non-custodial sentences exceed those of custodial sentences.

"We can see the prison service is completely overstretched and unable to cope with the influx of prisoners but so, again due to this government's abject failure, is the probation service and Labour should not run away from that fact."