Bench Marks

Magistrates are not trained to hear the cases of people who, if convicted, would be sent to prison for more than six months. They were not selected for that role. They had not applied for it. The last time that this was attempted, then they all had to be retrained, as will have to happen again. But the scheme was still abandoned after a few months, because the prisons were full while there had been no reduction in the Crown Court backlog. There is a serious shortage of magistrates, who are not paid a penny and who of course signed up on that understanding, and there is a serious shortage of their legal advisers.

There are people who need to be sent to prison for a very long time. I have drunk tea in front of Coronation Street with them. I have walked around exercise yards with them, talking about the weather. I have showered with them. I have turned to face the wall so that they might defecate, and they have done the same for me.

But if your sentence allowed for your release after less than 12 months, then you were obviously not bad enough to have been sent to prison at all, to spend 23 hours of the day either in front of the television or asleep. At an average annual cost to the public purse of £46,696, which is £127.93 per day, what good purpose does that serve? Let me assure you that there is absolutely none.

Incarceration should be for such as the five-year stretches handed down by judges after juries had convicted the directors and senior executives of United Utilities of having dumped more than 140 million litres of raw sewage into Windermere between 2021 and 2023 at times when it was not permitted. Dumping that would be known to future generations as one of the last acts of the lunatically privatised water companies, before the emergency renationalisation of Thames Water for nothing, since no one on the open market would have paid a penny for the shares, had set off the chain of events that had finally restored both sanity and sanitation.