Labour says Alex Chalk’s U-turn reveals ‘epic’ crisis in Conservatives’ jails policy
James Heappey, the armed forces minister, was doing a morning interview round on behalf of the government earlier. Speaking about the Israel-Hamas war, he told LBC that he thought Israel was “balancing correctly” the need to protect protect innocent lives against the need to deal with Hamas effectively.
Asked whether the government supports the blockade of water, medical supplies and power from Gaza, Heappey told LBC:
I think what we are recognising is that there is military necessity rubbing up against humanitarian necessity and what we’re saying to Israel is that they need and are, need to show the balance between those two imperatives.
It is the devil’s own choice that Israel has got to make but for my money they are balancing correctly the need to preserve innocent human life as best they possibly can while accepting that the adversary that they will soon launch an attack on, uses humans and shields and deliberately seeks to hide within civilian population and infrastructure.
We need to keep people safe – and that means moving away from short-term prison sentences that make hardened criminals rather than rehabilitated offenders. So we need to look again at low-level offenders. Because while the overall reoffending rate is 25%, the rate for people who spend fewer than 12 months in prison is over 50%.
A short stretch of a few months inside isn’t enough time to rehabilitate criminals, but is more than enough to dislocate them from the family, work and home connections that keep them from crime. Too often, offenders routinely turn back to crime as soon as they walk out of the prison gates.
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