David Gauke is wrong about short prison sentences

‘Short term custody isn’t inherently bad, but the way we do it is awful.’ I didn’t expect Justice Secretary David Gauke to start an otherwise thoughtful speech yesterday on prisons like this, but he should have. No one wants people in prison when there are better alternatives that will properly punish them and give them the tools to break away from offending. To do otherwise is stupid. But the debate has been overwhelmed by a fixation on sentence length that wrongly suggests that short imprisonment must always and forever be toxic and counterproductive.

Gauke presented his audience with sobering statistics on rates of incarceration putting us at the top of the league in Europe. We seem addicted to custody in this country, as long as it’s cheap. Let’s try some other data from countries often held up by our criminal justice commentariat as progressive role models. In Denmark in 2017, the average sentence length was 31-60 days.