Knife Crime

Debate between Sharon Hodgson and Sarah Jones

Monday 25th March 2019 Westminster Hall

[Sarah Jones (Croydon Central) (Lab)]

Thank you, Mr Davies, and it is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Hartlepool (Mike Hill) on having secured a really good cross-party debate, in which we are agreeing on a lot of issues. I wish that my hon. Friend the Member for Gedling (Vernon Coaker) had been my teacher; I had not realised that he was a teacher for 20 years, and I feel that I would have listened a lot more in school if he had been teaching me.

It is right for us to pay tribute to the family of Jodie Chesney, who Members have spoken about being from their area. I also want us to think about the people who have died in my constituency: Kelva Smith, Andre Aderemi and Jermaine Goupall, three people who lost their lives recently through knife crime. I am not going to talk about the need for funding, because we have established that, and I think we all agree on it. I will just say that there is a need to fund not just youth work and education, but housing. I currently have a mother and her eight-year-old daughter in my office who have been refused housing by everybody, and are completely destitute; we are desperately trying to get them somewhere to sleep tonight. Those wider issues massively impact on the life chances of our children, and we must never forget about them.

I will focus on sentencing, which is what we are debating. This issue is too important for us to not look at the facts about what impact sentencing has. We know that knife crime is at epidemic levels, with over 100 knife offences a day. Fatalities are at the highest level on record, with 285 people dead last year, and knife crime has gone up across virtually every area and police force in the country. Young people are disproportionately affected: 39 young people were killed last year, the highest level for 10 years, and according to NHS figures, there has been more than a 50% increase in stabbings of teenagers. More than 1,000 teenagers were admitted to hospital with stab wounds last year, and we know that many others do not go to A&E because they are scared of what might happen.

People are rightly concerned about this national crisis, but my view is that dramatically increasing sentences for knife offences is not the answer. We cannot enforce our way out of this problem by increasing sentences. We already have a tough regime for knife offenders, which has been getting tougher over the past decade. As I have said, we lock more people up than any EU country, and 400 children are in prison serving life sentences or sentences over 14 years. The proportion of people being sent to prison for knife offences has almost doubled: in 2010, about 40% of people caught with a knife were given a custodial sentence, but today, the proportion of knife possession offences receiving a custodial sentence is closer to 70%. Last year, more than a third of knife offenders received an immediate jail sentence, and in 2015, the Government introduced their two-strikes policy, which I mentioned earlier. That policy means that anyone over 18 who is caught twice gets a minimum six-month jail term. Despite those changes, knife offences have risen from 25,000 to over 40,000 since 2013. Contrary to what might seem to be the case, the evidence shows that tougher sentences do not deter people from committing crime.

Four main factors go into sentencing decisions: punishment, deterrence, public protection and rehabilitation. We are debating all those factors today. To begin with punishment, people who commit knife offences—particularly attacks on other people—absolutely need to receive strict punishments, but those are already available under the law. The types of punishment we are debating are not proportionate or appropriate for the vast majority of knife crime, particularly as those involved are disproportionately young people. The majority of children carrying knives are extremely vulnerable, and it is increasingly evident that many are being criminally exploited, groomed and coerced. Punishing them with punitive sentences risks turning this generation of young people into a generation in prison.

[Mrs Hodgson]

Will my hon. Friend give some details about why some of those young people are carrying knives—details that she will have picked up through all her work in this area? I know there has been lots of coverage of that point in some of our news media, and fear seems to be the main reason, but I wonder whether my hon. Friend could give some more details.

[Sarah Jones]

I could, and I could speak for far too long about that issue. It is not possible to say “all young people carry knives for this reason”: everybody has a different story to tell. In many of the tales shared by the young people who I have met, vulnerability is given as a reason, and my hon. Friend is absolutely right that fear is another. We know that knife crime is contagious. It acts like a disease; it spreads. As I have seen in Croydon, if some people in a school are known to be carrying knives, others will start to carry knives. That results in situations in which people are not in gangs and are not dealing drugs, but are carrying knives because they feel that they need to, so when there is a fight, instead of using their fists, they use a knife. There is a raft of issues involved; we have already talked about involvement in drugs and gangs, as well as violence in the home and in the family during a child’s early years. All kinds of things lead to people carrying knives, but fear is definitely a big one.

Turning to deterrence, a large body of research on knife crime over the past few years shows that simply setting longer sentences does not deter crime, as the Minister knows very well; I am sure he will talk about that. Research consistently shows that, if anything, it is the certainty of being caught that acts as a deterrent, not how severe the sentence is. A recent evidence review concluded that lengthy prison sentences and mandatory minimum sentencing cannot be justified on the grounds of deterrence. For sentences to be a factor in deterring crime, people need to know what the punishment for the crime is and then make a rational choice about whether to offend. However, awareness of sentencing is very low, and many people involved in knife crime—particularly young people—do not act rationally. People who have been in and out of prison for carrying knives have attended meetings of the all-party parliamentary group on knife crime, and they say that prison is not a deterrent at all: it is a break from the streets, somewhere they can be safe for a while before they have to go back.

Public protection is very important; we must of course keep the public safe by making sure that dangerous people are not on our streets. Home Office research found that a 15% increase in the use of custody would be required to produce just a 1% decrease in crime, and as we have talked about, our prisons are already overflowing. Surely it would be better for the Government to build on their recent £100 million boost to police funding and set a strong new basis for police funding in the autumn statement, in order to deter people through policing on the streets, rather than funding a huge increase in custodial sentences that would lead to a very small decrease in crime.

When it comes to rehabilitation, we know that dealing with children and young people outside the formal justice system is more effective at reducing offending than punitive responses. Involving a young person in custody makes them more likely to commit crime in the future. Young people who spoke to us at meetings of the all-party parliamentary group on knife crime talked about prison as a training camp, as the things that their colleagues could teach them were likely to increase crime, rather than reduce it. As the Minister also knows, conditions in prisons do not lend themselves to positive rehabilitation. Young people can be locked in their cells for 23 hours a day, and research has found that they face

“hunger, denial of fresh air, cramped and dirty cells, strip-searching, segregation, the authorised infliction of severe pain, uncivilised conditions for suicidal children”

and bullying and intimidation.

[Mrs Hodgson]

I apologise for interrupting my hon. Friend’s excellent speech, but I would have thought that part of the problem with rehabilitation is the recidivism of repeat offenders. Does she have an opinion about the part played by our now poorly functioning privatised probation service, through which offenders are probably not being rehabilitated as well as they should be?

[Sarah Jones]

I absolutely agree. There is a cycle. Surgeons in King’s College Hospital say that they are seeing the same children coming back again and again. The prison system says that the same children are going back time and again. There is the same cycle of going into prison, coming out of prison, committing a crime and getting stabbed. That is awful, and we need to break that cycle and get children and young people away from the situation they are in.

In terms of the four factors considered in sentencing, the evidence is just not there for harsher sentencing in this area. I will not talk about the public health approach and what we should be doing on prevention, but I want to highlight some work done in my borough of Croydon that paints the picture of where we need to go with our young people. Croydon completed what I think is a landmark report investigating the cases of 60 vulnerable adolescents. Those 60 children had all been involved in serious cases of violence or exploitation. Five had lost their lives. Three had been convicted of murder. One third of the boys had been victims of knife crime and three quarters were involved with gangs. More than half the girls in the cohort had been victims of sexual exploitation.

Of the 60 people who had been deeply involved in violence, half were known to children’s social services before the age of five. We knew who these children were from the very beginning. In all the cases, there were many interventions by the state, but they did not work. The state was involved in crisis management—when something happened, there was an intervention, but the state did not do the right thing to help those children.

Half those 60 children had witnessed or experienced domestic violence. We know that violence breeds violence. It is learned behaviour. If children see it in the home, they do it later on in life. Three quarters of the children had a parental absence on the father’s side, and a quarter had an absence on the mother’s side. There were many parental issues around drug or alcohol misuse and mental health funding. A third of the children had already been excluded by the time they left primary school, and every single child who was later convicted of a crime had been excluded from school.

I will not talk more about what that says, other than to say that they are vulnerable children growing up in difficult situations. That does not excuse the crime at all, but in so many of the cases I have come across, who is the victim and who is the perpetrator is the luck of the fight. It is not right to categorise some children as the evil ones perpetrating the crimes and some as the victims, because there is often crossover. In some cases, people are being harmed when they have absolutely nothing to do with anything, but in other cases, they are all in a difficult situation because they are all vulnerable. I would argue that putting them in prison for longer is not the answer. In Scotland, they are putting far fewer young people in prison and focusing on the ones who are there. In the youth offending prison, they are giving them lots of training, teaching them to read and write and giving them education and skills, and that has to be the right approach for the long term.

This is a national crisis. My hon. Friend the Member for Gedling put it correctly when he said that the Government need to come together to tackle the issue. In terms of this debate, sentencing is not the answer; many other things are.

UK Basketball

Debate between Sharon Hodgson and Sarah Jones

Tuesday 20th February 2018 Westminster Hall

[Mrs Hodgson]

Further to my hon. Friend’s point about youth crime, is she aware of a fantastic initiative in Newham, the Carry A Basketball Not A Blade campaign?

[Sarah Jones]

Absolutely. I have met many young people who have come out of prison, who have carried knives or who have been involved in knife crime or selling drugs. Many of them have responded well to sports, including through organisations such as Gloves Not Gunz. There are many different sporting activities that we can encourage people to get involved with, but basketball is a key one.

After the Croydon riots in 2011, teachers and basketball players in Croydon set up the Croydon Cougars. The club does fantastic work with local people, and it also manages to fit in some extra homework time, so that children can play basketball for free and get tuition and help with homework afterwards—a good combination. Croydon Council and OnSide Youth Zones are funding a very big and impressive new, all-singing, all-dancing, youth centre in Croydon that will cost £6 million and will open next year. It should bring in thousands of young people and give them things to do, and basketball will be a key part of it.

I want young people in Croydon to be able to say, “If I put the effort in, show talent and become good at this, there is a pathway right to the very top,” but unless we fund the very top as well as the grassroots, that pathway will not be there for them. I echo other hon. Members in urging the Minister to consider basketball really carefully and see whether she can find some money for it.