Recommendation 57

We heard that the decline in the use of community sentences may also be related to sentencers having, at some point, lost trust in them or how they used to be enforced. Lord Justice William Davis, Chair of the Sentencing Council, told us that “there is considerable anecdotal evidence” of “judges and magistrates losing confidence in community sentences. He elaborated: “We as the Council are constantly talking to judges and magistrates about different guidelines and aspects of sentencing as part of our evaluation process. In the course of those conversations from 2015 to 2017 it was a theme that judges and magistrates felt— ‘We simply do not think that the orders we are imposing will be enforced’.” 87