Written evidence to be reported to the House

Part of Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill – in a Public Bill Committee at 4:15 pm on 16 October 2007.

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Cindy Barnett: It is not a question of awareness of problems, but of awareness of statistics, which as we all know can be interpreted in various ways. Numbers are floating around that seem to show that while there is a high number of suspended sentence orders, the number of—I must get this the right way round—the wrong one has gone down. It seems to imply that in some cases a suspended sentence order was imposed whereas, in the past, a community sentence order would have been imposed. The difficult with that is that all cases are different, however, so it is extremely difficult to confirm that impression. We have said that because of the importance of the principle that a suspended sentence order cannot be imposed unless the custody threshold has been crossed, we certainly accept that an element of refreshing in training is always valuable. That is an important lesson that we should have firmly before us on every occasion.