Minority and trans criminals could avoid jail under new rules (Times, 6 March 2025)

The guidelines from the Sentencing Council:

https://www.sentencingcouncil.org.uk/overarching-guides/magistrates-court/item/imposition-of-community-and-custodial-sentences-overarching-guideline/

It would be useful to see more detail of what was in the guidance. The Sentencing Council puts out quite a lot of guidance, and it's usually heavily based on number crunching. They have a remit to be evidence based.

Starmer will know this, because he sat on the SC for five years when he was DPP.

If it's saying the evidence shows minority defendants are more likely to get custodial sentences, so judges should check their bias, I don't in principle have a problem with that. But that's pretty high level. We might then get into complicating factors like men with paraphilias are more likely to be sex offenders or sentencing figures for certain crimes might reflect ethnically based organised crime groups.

It all gets quite knotty, because, as much as we try to eliminate bias, offending statistics aren't politically correct.

I'm glad Shabana Mahmood is around to handle this. Along with Wes Streeting, she's one of the few current ministers who I'd trust to be sensible and tough.

”A source pointed out that some demographic cohorts suffer disadvantages in the criminal justice system.”

The answer to this is surely improved guidance on sentencing to ensure that it is equally applied, rather than giving advantage to certain groups?

From what I’ve seen it appears that “being transgender” is already taken into account by many judges, as the accused’s lawyers already often drive it home as a reason to avoid custodial sentences as well as an excuse as to why they did the crime.

Maybe it’s simply that the outrage this causes is over-reported, but the overrepresentation of MtF transitioners in various criminal cohorts needs to be better understood as there may be many reasons for it, including that transitioning has been found to have a correlation with personality disorders, that paraphilias cluster and that criminal men lie to get advantage, and it is currently seen by such criminal men, that claiming to be trans offers such an obvious advantage that it is the current in-vogue lie.

It’s an incredibly complex situation and it’s already widely causing unrest that the system is seen to be unfair. Making it more unfair is not going to help anybody as it will only drive resentment and prove the point of those who are already pointing out the inequality of treatment.

Shame the guidance was vague - if they’d simply flagged the evidence in plain terms it wouldnt be so controversial as it’s trying to eliminate the current 2 tier system but being too vague?. Maybe better to have been direct like: more black people are given custodial sentences instead of white people so judges need to check themselves.

Well, at least someone in Government is trying to correct this. I wonder if Starmer approves?