The government has been urged to make the biggest reforms to the justice system in decades, in a major new review of how criminals should be sentenced and jailed.The long-awaited sentencing review by former Tory justice secretary David Gauke – commissioned by Labour’s Shabana Mahmood in her first weeks in office as the prisons crisis reached boiling point – was published on Thursday.The review recommends vast changes to the way crimes are punished, including scrapping most jail sentences of less than a year in favour of community sentences and curfews, and extending the current use of chemical castration for some sexual offenders using drugs to reduce their libido and compulsive sexual thoughts.It also calls for “Texas-style” sentences with both a maximum and minimum term, in which prisoners could be released a third of the way into their sentence in reward for good behaviour, with a greater reliance on electronic tagging and curfews.Warning that “the scale of the crisis we are in cannot be understated”, with overcrowding leading to perilous conditions for prison staff and contributing to high levels of reoffending”, Mr Gauke warned that ministers “must take decisive action” and “cannot build their way out of” the current crisis.David Gauke, who chairs the review, is a former justice secretary (Kirsty O’Connor/PA) More
