It Depends On Your Definition Of ‘Petty Offences’, Of Course

For those unconvinced that prime minister Keir Starmer really wants to fix Britain, look no further than his appointment of James Timpson as prisons minister. Timpson, chief executive of the eponymous family business best known for shoe fixing and key making, is not an MP and has been parachuted into the job by Starmer with a peerage and a seat in the Lords.

His qualifications for the role?

As for Timpson, he is a businessman and chair of the Prison Reform Trust, with an outstanding track record of supporting ex-offenders in work and a commonsense radicalism in his approach to justice.

The Prison Reform Trust does what it says on the tin: it campaigns for reform of the prison system. Rather than jailing more people, this means jailing fewer of them. It means not giving custodial sentences for petty offences to parents who shoplift to feed their children or to people with drug and mental health problems who should be getting support in hospital or the community rather than being jailed, when their problems invariably get worse, sometimes to the point where they take their own life.

It means not introducing a bill that could criminalise homeless people for smelling.

Which no-one actually did, of course!

The bill defines “something that is a nuisance” in relation to a person who “causes or does something capable of causing damage”. A section of the criminal justice bill defines that damage as including “excessive noise, smells”.

Which can mean leaving behind offensive smelling rubbish, like these charming people in the middle of our capital. Which our police seem to do nothing about despite the law being their's to uphold.

On Channel 4’s Ways to Change the World podcast in February, he cited the Netherlands as a good example of what prison policy should be like. “They’ve shut half their prisons. Not because people are less naughty in Holland – it’s because they’ve got a different way of sentencing, which is community sentencing. People can stay at home, keep their jobs, keep their homes, keep reading their kids bedtime stories – and it means they’re far less likely to commit crime again.”

Or is that 'far less likely to get caught again'..? 

In that interview, Timpson said a third of prisoners should definitely be jailed, another third should probably not be there and “need some other kind of state support”, while for the final third prison is “a disaster … because it just puts them back in the offending cycle”.

And for some people, that cycle is their culture and nothing will break them out of it, so the periods they spend in jail is the only surcease their long suffering neighnourhood gets.   

At the Prison Reform Trust, Timpson has campaigned for resentencing as recommended by the justice committee in September 2022. This would mean that prisoners who have served their tariff would be released. Starmer’s Labour was not brave enough to support resentencing when it was in opposition.

Because they knew how unpopular it would be.  

As prisons minister, Timpson is now in the perfect position to show the way forward – to fellow ministers, to entrepreneurs, to the populists and bigots who want to see ever more people locked up.

Funny you should mention populists and bigots who want people locked up, Timpson. They might not be the ones you think you have to deal with in your new role...