Post by nickd on Mar 21, 2012 0:38:18 GMT 1
We are currently tacking a really close look at Government and its Legal Aid, Sentencing & Punishment of Offender's Bill reforms
We are looking beyond the legal aid part of the bill and here we take a look at Crispin Blunt. He's one of the Ministry of Justice's Committee members who voted against retaining social welfare legal aid within the legal aid scheme
Here is what Blunt says in a January 2011 edition of the Prison Officer's Journal
"The job of the Ministry of Justice is to incarcerate those who are sentenced to imprisonment by the courts and we cannot
completely predict that. What we have done is make assumptions about the future direction of policy, in particular reforms that will be presented to Parliament in the Sentencing and Rehabilitation Green Paper later in the year. That has informed our Spending Review bid and we have therefore made an estimate that the prison population will be 3,000 fewer by the end of the Parliament. However, these things are inevitably estimates."
"We need to make sure that all of those people, in the voluntary and private sector, are engaged to help us. If we do that we can then grow our capacity for rehabilitation. We have to do that because if we don’t grow our capacity for rehabilitation, then it won’t work."
You can read Blunt's message in full by using the link to the Journal, a lot of what he says is contradictory to the principles of voted for changes in the legal aid system which effectively remove social welfare help available within communities. Social welfare legal aid funds CAB's and law centres to provide key specialist help in areas such as debt, welfare benefits, housing, family issues and employment.
Blunt is bargaining on reducing the prison population by 3,000 by 2015, it's a bold statement when you are looking at the kind of economy we currently have; - it's the kind of economy which tends to increase crime. It places a big question mark over yet another assumption government has made over what it hopes to achieve.
Blunt places a particular emphasis on the vital role the voluntary sector should play in reducing re-offending. This is distinctly at odds with legal aid reforms which will undoubtedly increase all the kind of social tensions which so often act as a pre-cursor to crime. One of the surest ways of defusing social tension is through the provision of adequately resourced advice services. They need to be on the outside as well as inside of our prisons in order to be accessible to people we are supposedly trying to discourage from finding themselves on the inside.
www.crimeandjustice.org.uk/opus1853/10004C38PSJ_193_January_2011.pdf
We are looking beyond the legal aid part of the bill and here we take a look at Crispin Blunt. He's one of the Ministry of Justice's Committee members who voted against retaining social welfare legal aid within the legal aid scheme
Here is what Blunt says in a January 2011 edition of the Prison Officer's Journal
"The job of the Ministry of Justice is to incarcerate those who are sentenced to imprisonment by the courts and we cannot
completely predict that. What we have done is make assumptions about the future direction of policy, in particular reforms that will be presented to Parliament in the Sentencing and Rehabilitation Green Paper later in the year. That has informed our Spending Review bid and we have therefore made an estimate that the prison population will be 3,000 fewer by the end of the Parliament. However, these things are inevitably estimates."
"We need to make sure that all of those people, in the voluntary and private sector, are engaged to help us. If we do that we can then grow our capacity for rehabilitation. We have to do that because if we don’t grow our capacity for rehabilitation, then it won’t work."
You can read Blunt's message in full by using the link to the Journal, a lot of what he says is contradictory to the principles of voted for changes in the legal aid system which effectively remove social welfare help available within communities. Social welfare legal aid funds CAB's and law centres to provide key specialist help in areas such as debt, welfare benefits, housing, family issues and employment.
Blunt is bargaining on reducing the prison population by 3,000 by 2015, it's a bold statement when you are looking at the kind of economy we currently have; - it's the kind of economy which tends to increase crime. It places a big question mark over yet another assumption government has made over what it hopes to achieve.
Blunt places a particular emphasis on the vital role the voluntary sector should play in reducing re-offending. This is distinctly at odds with legal aid reforms which will undoubtedly increase all the kind of social tensions which so often act as a pre-cursor to crime. One of the surest ways of defusing social tension is through the provision of adequately resourced advice services. They need to be on the outside as well as inside of our prisons in order to be accessible to people we are supposedly trying to discourage from finding themselves on the inside.
www.crimeandjustice.org.uk/opus1853/10004C38PSJ_193_January_2011.pdf