Many judges are well versed in the problems, including overcrowding, that are blighting prisons in England and Wales. Some have been moved to comment on the state of prisons or take it into account when imposing sentences. Here are some examples:
The most significant recent case, given that it was at the court of appeal, came in March and concerned an appellant who threw boiling water over a prison guard. Lord Justice Edis, the senior presiding judge for England and Wales, quashed the six-month immediate custodial sentence and replaced it with a suspended sentence order. He referred to the announcement in October last year of the emergency use of 400 police cells to hold inmates (known as Operation Safeguard) to ease the pressure on the Prison Service and a letter from the then justice secretary, Dominic Raab, which said: “Detention would be harsher than before on account of high occupancy levels, reduced access to rehabilitation programmes and the possibility of prisoners being detained further away from home.” Edis said such considerations “will principally apply to shorter sentences because a significant proportion of such sentences is likely to be served during the time when the prison population is very high”. He added: “It will only apply to sentences passed during this time. We have identified above the starting point for the relevance of this consideration for sentencing, which we take to be the implementation of Operation Safeguard 14 days after 6 February 2023. Sentencing courts will now have an awareness of the impact of the current prison population levels from the material quoted in this judgment and can properly rely on that.”
Days later, the court of appeal ruling by Edis was cited at Liverpool crown court by Judge Stuart Driver KC, in handing a suspended sentence to a DHL driver who had pleaded guilty to seven counts of theft after £53,000 of parcels went missing, according to Inside Time.
Also in March, the Reading Chronicle reported that Judge Heather Norton KC told a drug dealer at his sentencing at Reading crown court: “The guidelines state that, when there’s a relatively short sentence or one on the cusp of a custodial sentence, it may be appropriate to suspend it. Given the current state of prisons and the overcrowding, I am going to suspend that sentence for 15 months.”
The court of appeal ruling was also cited in March, according to the Times, by Judge Robert Lazarus at a sentencing at Maidstone crown court of a drug driver with no licence who led police on a high-speed chase. It quoted Lazurus as saying: “I have to consider whether or not to suspend your sentence. Somebody who is prepared to drive as you did does represent a danger to the public. It is a finely balanced decision and in normal circumstances would probably result in me sending you immediately to prison. But I have to bear in mind the recent court of appeal decision which points out the current state of the prison population, and I have heard evidence of this happening in our local prisons in that it results in a limitation on the number of rehabilitation courses available and a lengthy wait to undertake such opportunities.”
More recently, in an embarrassment for the government, a German court refused to extradite to the UK a man accused of drug trafficking because of concerns about prison conditions in Britain. A translation of the court report said: “The court decided that the extradition of the Albanian to Britain was ‘currently inadmissible’. Without British guarantees, extradition is not possible in view of the state of the British prison system. There are no legal remedies against this.”
