Rory Stewart: Jail terms of less than a year should be SCRAPPED

Prison sentences of less than a year should be scrapped for all but the most serious offences, a justice minister has said. Despite insisting custodial sentences could still be given to violent and sexual offenders, Mr Stewart said he wanted to ‘significantly reduce, if not eliminate’ jail terms of under 12 months. If you stop handing out short sentences it will give criminals a green light to keep on offending for the rest of their lives.’ Mr Stewart told MPs that a push to 'significantly reduce, if not eliminate' the number of offenders locked up for under 12 months would help slash re-offending rates Figures released under freedom of information laws two years ago revealed 75 per cent of criminals sent to prison in England and Wales had at least one previous community sentence. A Ministry of Justice spokesman said: ‘We want to see the prison population come down, but public safety is paramount and we will not set an arbitrary target to reduce it.’ ‘That would act as a deterrent on one hand and, if they went back to jail, give the prison officers enough time to rehabilitate them and hopefully break the revolving door of crime.’ Ministry of Justice figures for 2015/16, the latest available, show that nearly two-thirds of offenders sentenced to less than 12 months in jail returned to crime within a year. He said: ‘We may want to exclude certain kinds of violent and sex offences under 12 months because we don’t want to discredit what is a really, really good initiative by a few hard cases blowing up where people say “What on earth are you doing not putting this person away in prison?”’ For lesser offenders who would be hit with community sentences – such as burglars, thieves and shoplifters – ministers believe the courts must ‘get better’ at using treatment programmes to break the cycle of crime.