Halleluiah! Has Tony seen the light at last?

From the Daily Telegraph:

Labour sentencing U-turn as jails reach bursting point

By Philip Johnston, Home Affairs Editor
Last Updated: 2:44am BST 27/03/2007

Tony Blair will today stage a dramatic U-turn on Labour's crime policy by conceding that too many offenders have been sent to jail since he took office 10 years ago.

Instead, the Prime Minister will end the drive for tougher sentences and place greater emphasis on rehabilitating offenders.

Senior Whitehall officials said the aim was to have a ''smarter'' approach to crime reduction, ''focusing on the offender not the offence".

The ideas are in a party policy review designed to set out a strategy for the next 10 years, even though Mr Blair is due to step down as Prime Minister.

The Opposition denounced the plans in advance as ''a ragbag'' of ineffective gimmicks. They include more summary powers for the police to deliver on-the-spot justice and ''bespoke'' programmes tailored to the needs of 5,000 persistent offenders.

Ministers have tried in vain for years to get the courts to send fewer people to prison. Tougher jail sentences combined with suspicion about community sentences have forced the prison population close to a record 80,000.

Mr Blair will accept that community punishments should be tougher if they are to be taken up by the courts.

He also wants more to be done about preparing prisoners for life outside. Similar ideas have been floated before but the cost of implementing them has been prohibitive.

The review calls for "tough and effective community sentences" as an alternative. It also wants to see fewer mentally ill people being jailed, although there are no community places for them.

Mr Blair, who began his premiership promising to be ''tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime'' believes that the ''causes'' part has been neglected.

The review says: "The Government is now in a position where it can focus on retaining stability in sentencing and increasing the focus on rehabilitation ... (it) must 'tackle the underlying causes of crime through preventative interventions and rehabilitation, addressing social exclusion, dysfunctional families, drugs and alcohol abuse'".

The report proposes a "more personalised approach with different solutions for different types of crime and different offenders."

An estimated 100,000 offenders are responsible for half of all crimes in England and Wales, with 5,000 of them responsible for one in 10 offences.

The response of the criminal justice system "should be personalised and differentiated to tackle the underlying causes of the offending behaviour in order to better address the likelihood of the individual reoffending".

But Mr Blair is certain to come under pressure over how such an ambitious programme could be financed.

One reason why he is shifting his ground is because the prisons are full as the Treasury did not put up the money to build more.

David Davis, the shadow home secretary, said: "Few things can be a clearer recognition of the abject failure of criminal justice policy in the last 10 years than this last-minute grandstanding attempt by Mr. Blair in the dying days of his premiership.

He added: "This ragbag of ill-thought-through ideas is likely to go the same way as Government proposals for cash point fines for yobs and night courts.

"What we need is a clearly thought-out penal policy that takes the worst criminals out of circulation, punishes them, gets them off drugs and, where possible, rehabilitates them. This is likely to prove impossible until this Government gets a grip on overcrowding in prisons and the chaos in our courts and ends its obsession with tying our police up in endless red tape."

Nick Clegg, the Liberal Democrat home affairs spokesman, said: ''If the reports of a real change of heart in the Government's approach to crime are true, this is a welcome U-turn.

"We have been warning for years that new Labour's obsessive pursuit of headlines, over-reliance on ever more illiberal legislation and fanatical 'get tough' rhetoric do little to tackle either the fear of crime or its root causes.''

The report concedes: "The actual and perceived level of anti-social behaviour remains unacceptably high."

It proposes "new types of summary powers" and an extension of existing ones such as on-the-spot fines.