Jeremy Corbyn: Jail not the answer to stop knife crime
Compulsory prison sentences for thugs found guilty of carrying a knife are not the answer to curbing the region’s violent crime epidemic, Jeremy Corbyn has said.
The Labour leader said ‘community service and restorative justice’ could be more effective than sending criminals to jail.
His views put him at odds with Labour MPs in the Black Country, who have backed an Express & Star campaign calling for mandatory prison terms for people involved in knife crime.
Speaking to the E&S during a visit to the Black Country, Mr Corbyn denied that he was being soft on crime, and insisted that Labour was not about ‘letting people off’.
WATCH Jeremy Corbyn interviewed in Stourbridge:
So far this year there have been 21 stabbings in the West Midlands, including five murders where a knife has been used.
Mr Corbyn said: “I would back a campaign to stop people carrying knives and I think they should be given appropriate sentences. A mandatory jail term is not necessarily the answer. Community service and restorative justice can be a much more effective tool.
“When I was on the justice committee we interviewed a woman who had been in prison on three successive times for quite bad crimes, the fourth time she wasn’t put in prison, she was given community service.
“I asked her: what is the worst thing that happened to you? She said: ‘I could cope with prison, I knew what to do. Community service was the best and worst thing that ever happened to me. I had to turn up...I had to do what I was told and it taught me something about responsibility’.
“We are not being soft. We are not letting people off. We need to work out what the best outcome is. If the outcome is that somebody stops carrying a knife and doesn’t commit a crime again, then that’s the outcome that we all want.”
His comments were backed by West Midlands PCC David Jamieson, who said: “If I thought mandatory sentencing was going to actually reduce knife crime I would be in favour of it.
“Actually we have got to look at prevention. We have got to look at why people are committing those crimes. We need to get the police into the communities if we are going to solve those crimes.
“Mandatory sentencing on its own I think is largely meaningless. It’s actually catching people and doing some prevention work.”
A number of Labour MPs in the Black Country have called for the introduction of compulsory prison sentences for people caught in possession of a knife.
West Bromwich West MP Adrian Bailey, said introducing mandatory prison sentences would ‘send a message that the issue is being taken seriously, and that anyone who carries a knife is crossing over a threshold’.
Pat McFadden, the Labour MP for Wolverhampton South East, backed the E&S campaign and said he wanted to see the Government ‘taking a tougher stand against the carrying and use of knives’.
In 2015 Mr Corbyn voted against Government legislation that said people convicted of a second knife offence should be sent to jail.
Mr Corbyn visited Stourbridge as part of a Labour action day against police cuts.
He has accused Theresa May and Amber Rudd of ‘trying to protect communities on the cheap’, and said: “The resources have to be made available to keep people safe.”
The Labour leader told the E&S that funding cuts were having a big impact on increasing crime levels across the West Midlands.
“There is no doubt that crime is being made worse by police funding cuts,” he said.
"If you have fewer officers on the beat and then you have slower clear up rates, which becomes part of the problem. There are also general issues of dislocation where you close youth centres and dismiss youth workers.
“We have to invest in the police, but we must also invest in what I call the social infrastructure that goes around people’s lives.”
Mr Jamieson, a long term critic of the Government over force budgets, says WMP has lost £145m over the last eight years.
In the next 12 months frontline police officer numbers across the region are set to fall by 78, despite a £9.5m funding boost achieved by raising the police council tax precept by £12.
And 24 police stations are set to close - including eight in the Black Country - as part of cost-cutting measures to save £5m.
He said: “It has taken time for crime to start going up, but what we are seeing now is that the police are unable to do the preventative work they were doing previously.”
The Government insists it has protected police budgets. However, in real terms funding was cut by £2.5bn from 2010-2015, with a further £500m slashed since then.
