More than three-quarters of the public believe that sentencing in England and Wales is too lenient (76%). According to a survey conducted as part of the Prison Reform Trust’s latest Bromley Briefing Prison Factfile also found that three-quarters of respondents (75%) believed sentences had become shorter in length despite sentence inflation since 1996.
The authors, Professor Julian Roberts and Dr Jonathon Bild of the Sentencing Academy, examined beliefs about particular offences noting that sentencing for murder has ‘become much more severe over the past 20 years’. The minimum term, the period that the individual must be imprisoned for before release can be considered, has climbed from an average of around 12 years to around 21 years today. However only a small minority of respondents (6%) thought that there had been any increase at all over the past 20 years and three-quarters thought that such sentences had decreased.
It was a pattern that continued across other offences and, for example, both the amount and length of prison sentences for rape were underestimated: The report stated that 96% of men aged 21 or over who were convicted of rape were imprisoned in 2019. But more then four out of 10 respondents (42%), ‘a significant minority of the public’, believed that the imprisonment rate was just 25% or less. Moreover, the report described the average rape sentence as nine years and nine months. Yet, just under half of those who responded to the survey believed that it was four years or less.
The custody rate for burglary was approximately 80% and had increased by 19% since 1996. However, three-quarters of respondents thought that the custody rate was half or less and believed that it had fallen since 1996.
Despite these increases, the proportion of respondents saying that sentencing was not harsh enough was down by just three percentage points since the 1996 British Crime Survey, indicating ‘almost no change in the public’s general attitudes to sentencing severity’.
Peter Dawson, the Director of the Prison Reform Trust, says that the Sentencing Academy’s survey ‘exposes how decades of lengthening sentences have utterly failed to improve public confidence in our justice system’.
Professor Roberts and Dr Bild have expressed support for ‘better dissemination of sentencing trends and information’. They continued: ‘If we do not, sentencing policy will continue to be shaped by calls to increase sentence lengths still further, not because out system is lenient, but because people perceive that it is.’
The government is currently seeking to make sentences even harsher through its Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill. The bill is due to have its third reading in the House of Lords today.
