What's also missing is any evidence that anything but lip service has been paid to the aims of providing purposeful community disposals (programmes that really do affect offending behaviour, such as those that exist for drink impaired drivers, men who have committed domestic violence and those that are designed to 'replace aggression'), or of identifying and treating in appropriate settings those suffering from mental health problems. If but a tiny fraction of the vast sums (£2.3 billion in capital costs alone, plus an extra £250 million a year in running costs) earmarked for Lord Carter's Titan Prisons were to be spent on providing effective community alternatives and finding more appropriate means of dealing with women (18,000 children a year see their mothers locked up), increasingly criminalised children, and those with mental health problems were to be spent on properly resourcing the Probation Service, we might see the current trends reversed (see the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation's new "Manifesto" on Rethinking Crime and Punishment for more detail). Instead (despite a paltry one-off £40 million top-up earlier this year), Government plans to cut Probation funding by 3% per annum for the next three years! There ARE other ways of addressing offending, such as restorative justice, but also curfews and joint working with local authorities to deliver locally identified community enhancement projects. The structure of the new Guidelines may well deliver greater consistency, but it remains to be seen whether they reach the parts that other never-ending reams of legislation have failed to reach, in particular alcohol and drug fuelled anti-social behaviour, or result in anything but at best a short term dip in low level custodial sentences. I have my doubts!

Jan Davies is spot on with her assessment. As a serving Magistrate, I entirely agree with final her remark.

I hope that this article is widely read. For people who actually think about the consequences of the new regime, it ought to cause a great deal of concern