This is an extraordinarily powerful review of what appears to be an extraordinarily powerful book:
Real Crime, Fake Justice
Theodore Dalrymple
City Journal, Summer 2006
For the last 40 years, government policy in Britain, de facto if not always de jure, has been to render the British population virtually defenseless against criminals and criminality. Almost alone of British government policies, this one has been supremely effective: no Briton nowadays goes many hours without wondering how to avoid being victimized by a criminal intent on theft, burglary, or violence.
An unholy alliance between politicians and bureaucrats who want to keep prison costs to a minimum, and liberal intellectuals who pretend to see in crime a natural and understandable response to social injustice, which it would be a further injustice to punish, has engendered a prolonged and so far unfinished experiment in leniency that has debased the quality of life of millions of people, especially the poor. Every day in our newspapers we read of the absurd and dangerous leniency of the criminal-justice system. On April 21, for example, even the Observer (one of the bastions of British liberalism responsible for the present situation) gave prominence to the official report into the case of Anthony Rice, who strangled and then stabbed Naomi Bryant to death.
Rice, it turned out, had been assaulting women since 1972. He had been convicted for assaulting or raping a total of 15 women before murdering Naomi Bryant, and it is a fair supposition that he had assaulted or raped many more who did not go to the police. In 1982, he grabbed a woman by the throat, held a knife to her, and raped her. Five years later, while out of prison on home leave, he grabbed a woman, pushed her into a garden, held a knife to her, and raped her for an hour. Receiving a life sentence, he was transferred to an open prison in 2002 and then released two years later on parole as a low-risk parolee. He received housing in a hostel for ex-prisoners in a village whose inhabitants had been told, to gain their acquiescence, that none of the residents there was violent; five months after his arrival, he murdered Naomi Bryant. In pronouncing another life sentence on him, the judge ordered that he should serve at least 25 years: in other words, even now the law has not quite thrown away the key.
Only five days later, the papers reported that 1,023 prisoners of foreign origin had been released from British prisons between 1999 and 2006 without having been deported. Among them were 5 killers, 7 kidnappers, 9 rapists and 39 other sex offenders, 4 arsonists, 41 burglars, 52 thieves, 93 robbers, and 204 drug offenders. Of the 1,023 prisoners, only 106 had since been traced. The Home Office, responsible for both prisons and immigration, still doesn’t know how many of the killers, arsonists, rapists, and kidnappers are at large; but it admits that most of them will never be found, at least until they are caught after committing another offense. Although these revelations forced the Home Secretary to resign, in fact the foreign criminals had been treated only as British criminals are treated. At least we can truly say that we do not discriminate in our leniency.
Scandal has followed scandal. A short time later, we learned that prisoners had been absconding from one open prison, Leyhill, at a rate of two a week for three years—323 in total since 1999, among them 22 murderers. This outrage came to light only when a senior policeman in the area of Leyhill told a member of Parliament that there had been a crime wave in the vicinity of the prison. The member of Parliament demanded the figures in the House of Commons; otherwise they would have remained secret.
None of these revelations, however, would have surprised a man called David Fraser, who has just published a book entitled A Land Fit for Criminals — the land in question being Great Britain, of course. Far from being mistakes—for mistakes repeated so often cease to be mere mistakes—all these occurrences are in full compliance with general policy in Britain with regard to crime and criminality.
Fraser was a probation officer for more than a quarter of a century. He began to doubt the value of his work in terms of preventing crime and therefore protecting the public, but he at first assumed that, as a comparatively lowly official in the criminal-justice system, he was too mired in the grainy everyday detail to see the bigger picture. He assumed also that those in charge not only knew what they were doing but had the public interest at heart.
Eventually, however, the penny dropped. Fraser’s lack of success in effecting any change in the criminals under his supervision, and thus in reducing the number of crimes that they subsequently committed, to the great misery of the general public, was not his failure alone but was general throughout the system. Even worse, he discovered that the bureaucrats who ran the system, and their political masters, did not care about this failure, at least from the point of view of its impact on public safety; careerist to the core, they were only concerned that the public should not become aware of the catastrophe. To this end, they indulged in obfuscation, statistical legerdemain, and outright lies in order to prevent the calamity that public knowledge of the truth would represent for them and their careers.
The collective intellectual dishonesty of those who worked in the system so outraged Fraser—and the Kafkaesque world in which he found himself, where nothing was called by its real name and language tended more to conceal meaning than to convey it, so exasperated him—that, though not a man apt to obtrude upon the public, he determined to write a book. It took him two and a half years to do so, based on 20 years of research, and it is clear from the very first page that he wrote it from a burning need to expose and exorcise the lies and evasions with which he lived for so long, lies and evasions that helped in a few decades transform a law-abiding country with a reputation for civility into the country with the highest crime rate in the Western world, with an ever-present undercurrent of violence in daily life. Like Luther, Fraser could not but speak out. And, as events unfolded, his book has had a publishing history that is additionally revealing of the state of Britain today.
By example after example (repetition being necessary to establish that he has not just alighted on an isolated case of absurdity that might be found in any large-scale enterprise), Fraser demonstrates the unscrupulous lengths to which both bureaucrats and governments have gone to disguise from the public the effect of their policies and decisions, carried out with an almost sadistic indifference to the welfare of common people.
He shows that liberal intellectuals and their bureaucratic allies have left no stone unturned to ensure that the law-abiding should be left as defenseless as possible against the predations of criminals, from the emasculation of the police to the devising of punishments that do not punish and the propagation of sophistry by experts to mislead and confuse the public about what is happening in society, confusion rendering the public helpless in the face of the experimentation perpetrated upon it.
The police, Fraser shows, are like a nearly defeated occupying colonial force that, while mayhem reigns everywhere else, has retreated to safe enclaves, there to shuffle paper and produce bogus information to propitiate their political masters. Their first line of defense is to refuse to record half the crime that comes to their attention, which itself is less than half the crime committed. Then they refuse to investigate recorded crime, or to arrest the culprits even when it is easy to do so and the evidence against them is overwhelming, because the prosecuting authorities will either decline to prosecute, or else the resultant sentence will be so trivial as to make the whole procedure (at least 19 forms to fill in after a single arrest) pointless.
In any case, the authorities want the police to use a sanction known as the caution—a mere verbal warning. Indeed, as Fraser points out, the Home Office even reprimanded the West Midlands Police Force for bringing too many apprehended offenders to court, instead of merely giving them a caution. In the official version, only minor crimes are dealt with in this fashion: but as Fraser points out, in the year 2000 alone, 600 cases of robbery, 4,300 cases of car theft, 6,600 offenses of burglary, 13,400 offenses against public order, 35,400 cases of violence against the person, and 67,600 cases of other kinds of theft were dealt with in this fashion—in effect, letting these 127,900 offenders off scot-free. When one considers that the police clear-up rate of all crimes in Britain is scarcely more than one in 20 (and even that figure is based upon official deception), the liberal intellectual claim, repeated ad nauseam in the press and on the air, that the British criminal-justice system is primitively retributive is absurd.
At every point in the system, Fraser shows, deception reigns. When a judge sentences a criminal to three years’ imprisonment, he knows perfectly well (as does the press that reports it) that in the vast majority of cases the criminal in question will serve 18 months at the very most, because he is entitled automatically, as of right, to a suspension of half his sentence. Moreover, under a scheme of early release, increasingly used, prisoners serve considerably less than half their sentence. They may be tagged electronically under a system of home curfew, intended to give the public an assurance that they are being monitored: but the electronic tag stays on for less than 12 hours daily, giving criminals plenty of opportunity to follow their careers. Even when the criminals remove their tags (and it is known that thousands are removed or vandalized every year) or fail to abide by other conditions of their early release, those who are supposedly monitoring them do nothing whatever, for fear of spoiling the statistics of the system’s success. When the Home Office tried the tagging system with young criminals, 73 percent of them were reconvicted within three months. The authorities nevertheless decided to extend the scheme. The failure of the British state to take its responsibilities seriously could not be more clearly expressed.
Fraser draws attention to the deeply corrupt system in Britain under which a criminal, once caught, may ask for other offenses that he has committed to be “taken into consideration.” (Criminals call these offenses T.I.C.s.) This practice may be in the interests of both the criminal and the police, but not in those of the long-suffering public. The court will sentence the criminal to further prison terms that run concurrently, not consecutively, to that imposed for the index offense: in other words, he will in effect serve the same sentence for 50 burglaries as for one burglary, and he can never again face charges for the 49 burglaries that have been “taken into consideration.” Meanwhile, the police can preen themselves that they have “solved” 50 crimes for the price of one.
One Probation Service smokescreen that Fraser knows from personal experience is to measure its own effectiveness by the proportion of criminals who complete their probation in compliance with court orders—a procedural outcome that has no significance whatever for the safety of the public. Such criminals come under the direct observation of probation officers only one hour a week at the very most. What they do the other 167 hours of the week the probation officers cannot possibly know. Unless one takes the preposterous view that such criminals are incapable of telling lies about their activities to their probation officers, mere attendance at the probation office is no guarantee whatever that they are now leading law-abiding lives.
But even if completion of probation orders were accepted as a surrogate measure of success in preventing re-offending, the Probation Service’s figures have long been completely corrupt—and for a very obvious reason. Until 1997, the probation officers themselves decided when noncompliance with their directions was so egregious that they “breached” the criminals under their supervision and returned them to the courts because of such noncompliance. Since their own effectiveness was measured by the proportion of probation orders “successfully” completed, they had a very powerful motive for disregarding the noncompliance of criminals. In such circumstances, all activity became strictly pro forma, with no purpose external to itself.
While the government put an end to this particular statistical legerdemain, probation orders still go into the statistics as “successfully completed” if they reach their official termination date—even in many cases if the offender gets arrested for committing further offenses before that date. Only in this way can the Home Office claim that between 70 and 80 percent of probation orders are “successfully completed.”
In their effort to prove the liberal orthodoxy that prison does not work, criminologists, government officials, and journalists have routinely used the lower reconviction rates of those sentenced to probation and other forms of noncustodial punishment (the word “punishment” in these circumstances being used very loosely) than those imprisoned. But if the aim is to protect the law-abiding, a comparison of reconviction rates of those imprisoned and those put on probation is irrelevant. What counts is the re-offending rate—a point so obvious that it is shameful that Fraser should have not only to make it but to hammer it home repeatedly, for the politicians, academics, and journalistic hangers-on have completely obscured it.
By definition, a man in prison can commit no crimes (except against fellow prisoners and prison staff). But what of those out in the world on probation? Of 1,000 male criminals on probation, Fraser makes clear, about 600 will be reconvicted at least once within the two years that the Home Office follows them up for statistical purposes. The rate of detection in Britain of all crimes being about 5 percent, those 1,000 criminals will actually have committed not 600, but at least 12,000 crimes (assuming them to have been averagely competent criminals chased by averagely incompetent police). Even this is not quite all. Since there are, in fact, about 150,000 people on probation in Britain, it means that at least 1.8 million crimes—more than an eighth of the nation’s total—must be committed annually by people on probation, within the very purview of the criminal-justice system, or very shortly after they have been on probation. While some of these crimes might be “victimless,” or at least impersonal, research has shown that these criminals inflict untold misery upon the British population: misery that they would not have been able to inflict had they been in prison for a year instead of on probation.
To compare the reconviction rates of ex-prisoners and people on probation as an argument against prison is not only irrelevant from the point of view of public safety but is also logically absurd. Of course the imprisoned will have higher reconviction rates once they get out of jail—not because prison failed to reform them, but because it is the most hardened, incorrigible, and recidivist criminals who go to prison. Again, this point is so obvious that it is shameful that anyone should have to point it out; yet politicians and others continue to use the reconviction rates as if they were a proper basis for deciding policy.
Relentless for hundreds of pages, Fraser provides examples of how the British government and its bloated and totally ineffectual bureaucratic apparatus, through moral and intellectual frivolity as well as plain incompetence, has failed in its elementary and sole inescapable duty: to protect the lives and property of the citizenry. He exposes the absurd prejudice that has become a virtually unassailable orthodoxy among the intellectual and political elite: that we have too many prisoners in Britain, as if there were an ideal number of prisoners, derived from a purely abstract principle, at which, independent of the number of crimes committed, we should aim. He describes in full detail the moral and intellectual corruption of the British criminal-justice system, from police decisions not to record crimes or to charge wrongdoers, to the absurdly light sentences given after conviction and the administrative means by which prisoners end up serving less than half their time, irrespective of their dangerousness or the likelihood that they will re-offend.
According to Fraser, at the heart of the British idiocy is the condescending and totally unrealistic idea—which, however, provides employment opportunities for armies of apparatchiks, as well as being psychologically gratifying—that burglars, thieves, and robbers are not conscious malefactors who calculate their chances of getting away with it, but people in the grip of something rather like a mental disease, whose thoughts, feelings, and decision-making processes need to be restructured. The whole criminal-justice system ought therefore to act in a therapeutic or medical, rather than a punitive and deterrent, fashion. Burglars do not know, poor things, that householders are upset by housebreaking, and so we must educate and inform them on this point; and we must also seek to persuade them of something that all their experience so far has taught them to be false, namely that crime does not pay.
All in all, Fraser’s book is a searing and unanswerable (or at least so far unanswered) indictment of the British criminal-justice system, and therefore of the British state. As Fraser pointed out to me, the failure of the state to protect the lives and property of its citizens, and to take seriously its duty in this regard, creates a politically dangerous situation, for it puts the very legitimacy of the state itself at risk. The potential consequences are incalculable, for the failure might bring the rule of law itself into disrepute and give an opportunity to the brutal and the authoritarian.
You might have thought that any publisher would gratefully accept a book so urgent in its message, so transparently the product of a burning need to communicate obvious but uncomfortable truths of such public interest, conveyed in such a way that anyone of reasonable intelligence might understand them. Any publisher, you would think, would feel fortunate to have such a manuscript land on his desk. But you would be wrong, at least as far as Britain is concerned.
So uncongenial was Fraser’s message to all right-thinking Britons that 60 publishers to whom he sent the book turned it down. In a country that publishes more than 10,000 books monthly, not many of which are imperishable masterpieces, there was no room for it or for what it said, though it would take no great acumen to see its commercial possibilities in a country crowded with crime victims. So great was the pressure of the orthodoxy now weighing on the minds of the British intelligentsia that Fraser might as well have gone to Mecca and said that there is no God and that Mohammed was not His prophet. Of course, no publisher actually told him that what he said was unacceptable or unsayable in public: his book merely did not “fit the list” of any publisher. He was the victim of British publishing’s equivalent of Mafia omerta.
Fortunately, he did not give up, as he sometimes thought of doing. The 61st publisher to whom he sent the book accepted it. I mean no disrespect to her judgment when I say that it was her personal situation that distinguished her from her fellow publishers: for her husband’s son by a previous marriage had not long before been murdered in the street, stabbed by a drug-dealing Jamaican immigrant, aged 20, who had not been deported despite his criminal record but instead allowed to stay in the country as if he were a national treasure to be at all costs cherished and nurtured. Indeed, in court, his lawyer presented him as an unemployed painter and decorator, the victim of racial prejudice (a mitigating circumstance, of course), a view that the prosecution did not challenge, even though the killer had somehow managed alchemically to transmute his unemployment benefits into a new convertible costing some $54,000.
The maternal grandmother of the murdered boy, who had never been ill in her life, died of a heart attack a week after his death, and so the funeral was a double one. It is difficult to resist the conclusion that the killer killed not one but two people. He received a sentence of eight years—which, in effect, will be four or five years.
I asked the publisher the impossible question of whether she would have published the book if someone close to her had not had such firsthand experience of the frivolous leniency of the British criminal-justice system. She said she thought so: but what is beyond dispute is that the murder made her publication of the book a certainty.
A Land Fit for Criminals has sold well and has been very widely discussed, though not by the most important liberal newspapers, which would find the whole subject in bad taste. But the book’s publishing history demonstrates how close we have come to an almost totalitarian uniformity of the sayable, imposed informally by right-thinking people in the name of humanity, but in utter disregard for the truth and the reality of their fellow citizens’ lives. Better that they, the right-thinking, should feel pleased with their own rectitude and broadmindedness, than that millions should be freed of their fear of robbery and violence, as in crime-ridden, pre-Giuliani New York. Too bad Fraser’s voice had to be heard over someone’s dead body.
9 comments:
In other words, what Frazer describes as a deception is in fact a damn fine organisational system
But if the general public or Jury are unaware that a three year prison sentence is automatically suspended to half surely a deception has occured regardless of the merits of the system?
Couple of points:
1. Totally true that the jury's responsibility is to decide guilt, the judge's to decide sentence.
2. If in fact a "3 year" sentence now actually means "18 months" as a result of a change in the law, but judges then compensate for this by raising the sentences they hand out, then the change would have made no practical difference. I have not seen any data on whether they *are* in fact handing out such raised tariffs, but my gut instinct is that they probably are not, and therefore that sentencing probably is lighter than it used to be. But I defer to anyone who can dig up hard data on this.
3. This issue about whether 3 years means 18 months seems to me to be by far the most inconsequential of the many issues raised in the article.
Tired of politically correct policing? Call sheriff
Telegraph
11/06/2007
A think-tank recently surveyed a series of constabularies to ask them what their priorities should be. Their answers were predictable enough. Police chiefs felt they should concentrate on cracking down on sexist language, recruiting ethnically diverse officers and improving relations with minority groups. The think tank then asked local residents what they thought the police's priority should be. Their response, too, was predictable: catching criminals.
As things stand, there is no mechanism to align the latter with the former. The police are virtually outside democratic control. No one admits this, of course. At every election, national or local, the candidates of all three parties wearily pledge to put more bobbies on the beat.
But they are promising something that is not in their gift to deliver. The deployment of police personnel is wholly at the discretion of chief constables. The only voice that elected representatives have is as a minority on the Police Authorities, which is in any case divided proportionately among local parties.
Voters, hearing the ritualistic promises of "more police", but never in fact seeing any more police, have understandably given up on the whole charade.
Just imagine how different things would be if the police were directly accountable to their local communities.
Suppose that local Sheriffs, elected in county or city divisions, had to decide how to deploy their resources. Suppose they had to decide whether to spend their budgets on more patrols or on more speed cameras, and then stand for re-election on the basis of their record.
Imagine, further, that the Sheriff was entitled to set local sentencing guidelines (although not to interfere in individual cases). People are forever complaining that the penal system bears no relationship to their priorities. How better to draw criminal justice back into the orbital pull of public opinion than by placing the powers of the Police Authorities and the Crown Prosecution Service under someone dependent on local votes?
But surely, you object, we should leave these sensitive matters to qualified professionals rather than to elected populists. Really? The same qualified professionals who have presided over the highest per capita crime rate in the Western world? The same legal system that sends a seventh conviction burglar to prison for an average of 21 months?
We all like the idea of the "expert": the disinterested technocrat who can rise above the pressures of demagogic politics. The trouble is that no such person exists. Indeed, if by "expert" we mean someone who has spent his whole career in a particular profession, he is the last person we should put in charge of invigilating it. It is precisely the demand that we should "let the professionals get on with things" that has brought us to the present pass.
The elevation of the "expert" means that we now habitually allow judges to strike down the will of Parliament. For example, four Home Secretaries have tried to deport the Afghan hijackers who arrived here by diverting their flight to Stansted.
Each repatriation order has been overturned - despite the crime committed, and despite the blood and treasure invested by Britain to rid Afghanistan of the Taliban regime from which the hijackers claimed to be fleeing.
In "Send for the Sheriff", published today by the Centre for Policy Studies and available online at www.telegraph.co.uk/thinklocal, we list a series of blatant cases of judicial activism: that is, of judges ruling on the basis of what they think the law ought to say rather than what it says.
The phenomenon is increasingly global, as human rights codes and supra-national courts override the decisions of elected parliaments.
The solution is to go in the opposite direction: to disperse jurisdiction rather than internationalising it. In other words, to bring the legal system closer to the people it affects.
This could lead to asymmetries: an intrinsic quality of localism. It may well happen that, for example, the Sheriff of Kent decides that shoplifters should serve custodial sentences, while the Sheriff of Surrey favours alternative penalties. One of two things would then happen.
Either Kentish crooks (and crooks of Kent) would flood across the county border in such numbers that the people of Surrey would elect a tougher Sheriff. Or the people of Kent would get sick of funding the requisite number of prison places.
At which point, their Sheriff might decide on more imaginative solutions. He might, for example, decree that shoplifters should stand outside Bluewater with a placard saying "Shoplifter". We don't know what people would choose: that's the essence of localism.
We can be certain, though, that the application of the law - the supreme power that a state exerts over its citizens - would be brought closer to local communities. Such a reform, even if wholly unaccompanied, would go a long way towards remedying the widespread alienation from politics.
Learning the hard way we can’t teach yobs a lesson any more
Rod Liddle
The Sunday Times
September 2, 2007
A child has just been awarded £4,000 in compensation for having been placed, feet first, in a litter bin by a policeman. Maybe it was the wrong sort of bin, one of those that takes only cardboard and unsold copies of The Independent, rather than badly behaved inner-city yoof. Maybe we need yet another set of bins for our front gardens — a red one for lippy, troublesome teenagers and a guaranteed weekly collection by the council for melting down and recycling.
Anyway, the copper was ticked off and we — through the Metropolitan police — forked out. The boy’s name was Anop Singh, then aged 15, and he had been pelting people with conkers in Stoke Newington High Street, north London. A policeman approached him and a free and frank exchange of views took place, culminating in the rozzer hoisting Anop off his feet and threatening to put him in the litter bin. “Go on then,” goaded Anop, unwisely. Shouldn’t have said that, kid, should you?
What I liked best about the story was Anop’s response upon pocketing the compensation two years after the incident. “The money would never make up for the humiliation and distress I suffered,” he said, apparently keeping a straight face. Reading that, you half wish the copper had dispensed with the bin and just thrown him headfirst into one of those giant metal-crushing machines that you see on the dilapidated outskirts of our cities, or into one of those enormous furnaces for toxic medical waste that may or may not lead to cancer clusters.
However, I suppose it’s not Anop’s fault, that terrible reflexive whining about distress and bullying. It’s gibberish he has learnt, by rote, from adults — about the only thing our youngsters do learn by rote these days. Anop may be pig ignorant in most regards, but he sure knows his rights.
Some of you liberals may think well, actually, I don’t think policemen should put children in litter bins. A fair point. The alternative for this particular policeman was to arrest the youngster, take witness statements, haul Anop down to the nick, fill in 672 separate forms, contact the vast and ineffectual local social services department and start preparing a case for the juvenile courts. Which would, of course, set the little wretch free without even the vaguest of admonishments and would end up costing the taxpayer rather more than £4,000.
Anop’s dad was right behind his son in his claim for official redress. We need yet another kind of bin for the likes of Anop’s dad.
My guess is that there are about 17 people in Britain — and that’s counting Anop and his dad — who think that the £4,000 payout is justified. The overwhelming majority know that our errant youth are treated with far too much indulgence and that people stupid enough to confront antisocial behaviour in the street get short shrift from the police and often end up being charged themselves. Even when they are the police.
The case of Anop Singh has become almost a cliché: wearily, we know the balance is wrong. Just as we know that the scales of justice are tilted unfairly in favour of the asylum seeker who commits a crime and against his or her British-born victim. Yet there is no political imperative to redress these obvious anomalies; such a thing would be seen as illiberal.
Later we wonder how come our young people seem intent on shooting one another, as if there were no link between our official indulgence and the horrible spiralling of violence.
Peter Hitchens on Prison (with a passing reference to Theodore Dalrymple):
Inside Out - The Tories accept the Liberal view of prisons by asking Jonathan Aitken's opinion
'Actually I don't think that Jonathan Aitken or Jeffrey Archer should have gone to prison, though both should certainly have been disgraced for their lies in court.
Perjury in civil cases rarely if ever leads to jail, and it has always been my view that these two went to jail as part of a general Blairite frenzy, in which the criminal justice system sought to show that it was as New Labour as everyone else.
Oddly enough, though I think Jeffrey Archer in general a laughable figure, I have some sympathy for the way he has behaved since he was imprisoned.
His books on his experiences are interesting and informative for anyone who is paying attention, and I think he was treated spitefully and exceptionally by the authorities when they put him back into a closed prison.
As for Jonathan Aitken, I am of course delighted at his repentance, but if he really is so awfully penitent, shouldn't he be more inclined to shut up about it?
He hasn't exactly gone into a Profumo-like purdah ( *some of you may not know that John Profumo, who shared the favours of the call girl Christine Keeler with a Soviet Diplomat while he was a junior defence minister in the 1960s, and lied to the Commons about it, then vanished into London's east End for 40 years, doing quiet good works and keeping his mouth shut).
In fact Mr Aitken is the most glamorous, jolly penitent I think I have ever come across.
And now he has accepted an unpaid job with the Tory Party, advising them about prisons.
In one way, this delights me. I think the Tories are amazingly inept, to remind those who had forgotten, and tell those who never knew, about Jonathan Aitken's mysterious libel suit and its wretched outcome.
I trust it will slow down their alleged resurgence, not that I think their vote is in reality anything near what the polls pretend. I should be interested to see it tested at a by-election.
But even more damaging is the idea that the reform of the prisons should be, or can be, accomplished thanks to the views or reminiscences of a former middle-class prisoner.
Much of the mess in our prisons today is thanks to reforms demanded after middle class suffragettes and pacifists were locked up in prison in the first two decades of the 20th century.
The resulting reforms created jails better suited for Bertrand Russell and Christabel Pankhurst, but much too nice for the Kray brothers.
The key thing about our prisons is not the effect that they have on those who are sent to them. It is the effect they have on the vast majority who are not sent to them.
This is twofold. Do they protect the unharmful and the law-abiding from crime and disorder? Do they deter those who might consider breaking the law, by spreading fear of what will happen to them if they do? No, and no.
For far too long, British political and social reformers have looked at prisons from the point of view of the inmate. This is largely pointless.
Prisons these days mostly contain people who are already pretty incorrigible by the time they get there (I should add here that there is also a fair leavening of pitiful incompetents, too dim to outwit even our modern police, and , tragically, the mentally ill abandoned by 'Care in the Community'. But these are not the concern of this article).
It is far harder to get into a British prison than it is to get into most British universities.
The typical British criminal (unless he is a retired vicar refusing to pay his council tax, or she is a victim of crime and intimidation desperately defending herself when the police have failed to do so) must try, and try and try again to persuade a reluctant police to stop giving him cautions, a reluctant CPS to prosecute him if the police want him prosecuted, and then to persuade reluctant judges and magistrates actually to send him there.
If there had ever been any chance of 'rehabilitation', then it will have been missed long, long before he finally collects his prison track-suit bottoms at the reception desk in Wormwood Scrubs.
And the impression I have gained from my own visit to Wormwood Scrubs a few years ago, and from conversations and correspondence with prison warders ( as well as a careful reading if reports on such prisons as Wymott, in Lancashire) is that the prisons are now largely in the hands of the inmates.
The officers, in my view, do a surprisingly good job in trying to prevent our prisons from turning into absolute hell-holes. But they simply lack the authority to do the job they ought to be doing.
This means that a violent, ruthless person, given to drug-taking, will cope perfectly well in prison, where he will find the informal rules of behaviour favour him.
Prison, on the other hand, is often a place of terror and misery for the gentle and non-violent, and for those who do not have the support of a gang or other group . Heaven help the wrongly convicted in such places.
This is even worse in the penitentiaries of the USA,where there is far less protection for the weak against the strong.
So, for those who most need to be punished, prison is not a place of punishment at all. The regime has been softened to such an extent that career criminals view occasional periods of imprisonment as necessary hazards of the job, to be cheerfully borne.
In some cases, according to the retired Prison doctor Theodore Dalrymple, petty criminals and drug addicts actually welcome their spells in prison as a time when they are looked after.
Thus 'rehabilitation', always a fanciful idea when applied to adults with formed, is even more unlikely than it might appear.
The best we can hope for is that the evildoers get older and eventually give up because they aren't strong enough any more.
What's more, word gets out among those who are potential criminals, that this is what awaits them if they eventually rack up enough cautions and unpaid fines and suspended sentences to qualify for an actual spell inside… And it does not deter them.
Do not mistake this for a claim that prisons are 'holiday camps' or 'hotels'. That is silly language, exaggerated and untrue. The real problem is that they are not really anything.
The American expression 'warehousing' is the most accurate. They have no moral force, no confidence in the rightness of their objective (if they have one at all), no belief that their inmates have done evil things for which they need to do penance.
They claim to be a form of mental hospital, in which troubled 'offenders' are set on the straight and narrow. But they have no medicines, real or metaphorical, to achieve this. In any case, they don't really believe in the straight and narrow.
Nobody is sentenced these days until 'reports' on his circumstances have been prepared. So his crimes are explained, and partly excused, by his background.
There is no true withdrawal of normal life. There is TV, there are games, gyms, a choice of food, undemanding work - and there are drugs, which circulate unchecked throughout most of the system.
There are few punishments, and these are harder and harder to inflict under Human Rights laws. Sentences are automatically halved, so remission does not need to be earned.
The effect on those who obey the law out of duty is not hard to find. We are abandoned. If you doubt this, then explain this week's admission by the police that two million crimes a year (40% of crimes) now go uninvestigated, because there are too many of them.
There are too many of them because, for far too long, we have had a cardboard criminal justice system that frightens nobody.
A general realisation among the nasty that they will not be seriously punished for crimes or evil actions increases the numbers of the nasty and the number of crimes they commit, until a police force ten million strong couldn't cope.
That is where we are.
The last thing we need is even nicer prisons, designed with the aid of an Old Etonian former Tory Cabinet Minister.'
I wonder if Guardianista Toynbee has considered all the possible causal relationships between the two facts she cites here? I suspect she has not even considered the most plausible of them.
Labour's legacy is a puzzle of moral contradictions
Polly Toynbee
The Guardian,
Tuesday June 17, 2008
...As prison numbers jump yet again despite record falls in crime...
In discussions on the great cost of prisons you rarely see anything in the plus column, but this article finds one, cos it sure don't cost near on £300K/yr to keep a bad 'un locked up.
The average number of offences committed by a single criminal is 140 per year, according to a Home Office survey. Civitas, the think tank, estimates the cost to society of one active criminal committing 140 crimes is £280,000 a year
Peter Hitchens asks 'What's the point of Prisons?". The post is too long to post so you'll have to follow the link (the last but one paragraph about the secular state will raise a few eyebrows to say the least!):
"What's the point of prison?
Prison is actually a great advance on what went before. Before modern prisons there were gallows, gibbets, pillories, mutilation and transportation. The idea of imprisonment as a punishment in itself, rather than as a nasty interlude while awaiting something worse, is really quite modern.
Nobody has thought about it very much for rather a long time. [...]
The great reformers, Elizabeth Fry and John Howard, were concerned to end the squalor, neglect and moral depravity of the old gaols. My guess is that they would regard today's prisons as ludicrous caricatures of the idea of imprisonment, designed to fail.
By the end of the 19th century, thanks to wise reform and the abandonment of the wilder liberal ideas, the Victorians had arrived at rather a good compromise.
The police deterred crime in cities and countryside, the Churches and the Temperance movement worked constantly to improve morality. Heinous murderers were hanged, so there were very few of them. The municipal reformers sought to clear the slums.
And the declining numbers who committed crimes went to prisons which were austere and harsh but not cruel or chaotic or diseased.
Prisoners had to work. They were kept under strict discipline, they lived in single cells and every moment of their lives was governed by hard rules. They could associate with each other only in very limited circumstances. Food was basic. Heating in winter was minimal. Contact with the outside world was very limited. Tobacco was not allowed (let alone drugs). Remission had to be earned by consistent good behaviour, as did privileges - access to books, visits, letters, better food.
In short, the authorities had the upper hand, all the time. Prison terms were not usually particularly long, but few who had undergone them wished to sample the fare again. Word got out that a spell in prison was to be avoided. People avoided it.
[...]In the year 1900-1901, the prison population for England and Wales was 17,435.
Nor did it increase with the population. With the Victorian system still more or less in full operation, the prison population for England and Wales in 1930-1931 was 11,346. In 1950-1951, it was 20,474. In 1960-61, it was 27,099.
It was then that it began its accelerating upward curve, hitting 39,000 in 1970, 42,300 in 1980, 45,000 in 1990, almost 65,000 in 1999.
Last Friday it was at 84,593 (This is well above the official limit of 72,000, in operation in 2002).
And remember this is despite the automatic halving of most sentences (regardless of good behaviour), introduced by the Useless Tories in the infamous 1991 Criminal Justice Act, mass releases of prisoners on tags, and the new dodge of sending more prisoners on home leave, which emerged at the weekend).
We are often told that we imprison more people than any other European country (though in fact the gap isn't that big, as careful study of the figures shows). But this endlessly repeated liberal whine fails to notice that we also have many more crimes and criminals than any comparable European country.
If we imprisoned at the rate they do, we would have even more people inside. But we do not. We either don't send them to prison in the first place or we let them out as fast as possible."
Follow the link above to read in full.
Worth reading to the end of the Hitchens article:
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The figures invariably show that rates of re-offending are very high. The liberal explains this by claiming that prisons do no good, and instead actually teach prisoners how to be criminals (Hence the famous 'making bad people worse' claim, actually made by a fairly sensible Tory Home Secretary, David Waddington, perhaps after having been got at by his officials).
They ignore the blindingly obvious fact that it is now very hard indeed to get sent to prison. Offences which would once have resulted in quite severe sentences now lead to no more than a caution, as we saw last week. And that is if the police can even be bothered to investigate them and pursue the culprit, which they often cannot, or the CPS is willing to proceed, which it often isn't.
The crucial point in this argument is as follows. By the time a man gets sent to prison, he is already a multiple repeat offender, who has learned over many years that authority is weak and who sees a prison sentence as a tolerable career risk at worst and a badge of honour at best.
So the fact that there is a high rate of reoffending amongst former prisoners does not reflect the failure of the prisons. It reflects the long, earlier, failure of the criminal justice system to deter crime. Grasp this, and you will have the key to the matter. Fail to grasp it, and you will remain forever bamboozled by conventional wisdom.
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