Ministers were accused of presiding over a 'shambles' last night as it emerged they do not know how many criminals are escaping with soft sentences. The Ministry of Justice said inaccuracies were preventing the publication of the two most important sets of punishment statistics kept by the Government. They will now be delayed until next year -- keeping the public in the dark about the impact of Labour's controversial plea for the courts to send fewer offenders to jail.
The fiasco centres on officials not being sure how convicts are being punished for so-called summary offences, which often carry fines or communities penalties.
Tory justice spokesman Dominic Grieve said: 'This is yet another example of this Government's inability to be open and honest about crime. It is a total shambles that [Jack Straw] cannot even deliver basic figures on the prison population and sentencing. If the Government can't even measure the size of these serious problems competently, what chance does it have of dealing with violent crime and rising reoffending?'
In a statement, the Ministry of Justice said the annual sentencing figures, due for publication next month, would be delayed until 2010. Another document, Criminal Statistics 2008, which contains vast swathes of data on flows through the courts, including the number of cautions given out and details of motoring offences, will also be delayed. Officials said 'data quality issues' were affecting the documents, each of which runs to more than 200 hundred pages.
| 'Shambles' originally meant the wooden tables where butchers carved meat for sale. It's still used to refer to the areas in old cities like York that once hosted such activities IIRC. How long before this headline becomes literally true for Brits as the justice system there, having been gutted in the name of multiculti sensitivity, breaks down entirely? |