Back to the Drawing Board

The Intermittent Custody (weekend jail) scheme that has been on trial for a couple of years has now been abandoned. The official line is: "The high prison population and the need to divert attention energies and resources to protect the public from the most and more serious offenders". Yeah, right.
In practice, the scheme was a shambles. I have heard from a defence solicitor about clients who would go to the locality of the(open) prison where they were to serve their IC sentence leaving enough time for an afternoon in the pub with fellow miscreants, reporting half-cut to the prison gates just before the deadline. In practice there was little or no effective sanction that could be applied, so the scheme has bitten the dust.