JAIL IS NOT THE ANSWER

David Blunkett has once again shown his unfailing instinct for making a bad situation worse. His declaration, after the shooting dead of two young women in Birmingham, that the courts will be told to sentence anyone caught with an illegal firearm to at least five years in jail, was typical of the Home Secretary’s ill-considered desire to sound tough. Like many a loudmouth before him, he has compromised himself by uttering boasts he is quite unable to keep. It takes only a moment’s thought to realise that there are some instances in which a person found in possession of an illegal firearm would deserve nothing like five years in jail. It accordingly took only a day or two for the government to admit that there would have to be ‘exceptions’ to the Home Secretary’s new rule, after which it found itself in the absurd position of backing him while simultaneously disowning what he had said.

But Mr Blunkett’s folly – by which we mean his capacity for making empty threats – does not end there. He was speaking, as surely he of all people might have remembered, soon after Lord Woolf, the Lord Chief Justice, had said that the courts should impose non-custodial sentences on first-time ‘standard domestic’ burglars. Lord Irvine, the Lord Chancellor, this week supported Lord Woolf’s line, which plainly has much to commend it. The prisons are grotesquely full, and the last thing Mr Blunkett should wish to do is make them even fuller. Keeping first-time offenders out of prison will in many cases offer a better prospect of stopping them becoming second-time offenders than a custodial sentence.