Tough on the causes of crime
Posted on Wednesday 24 January, 2007
Filed Under Uncategorized
Britain’s prison crisis keeps on keeping on. With 80,000 inmates banged up, home secretary John Reid has written to judges and magistrates, asking that only the most dangerous and persistent criminals should be locked up.
But isn’t that what should be happening anyway? Incarcerating minor offenders and abandoning serious attempts at rehabilitation only makes them more likely to become repeat offenders.
In the words of New Labour’s own Social Exclusion Unit: ‘By aggravating the factors associated with re-offending, prison sentences can be counter-productive as a contribution to crime reduction and public safety.’ Translation: prison can encourage crime.
Some 57% of male ex-prisoners are reconvicted within two years, and 68% within four. Nine out of ten of teenagers that serve time in youth custody centres are reconvicted within two years.
There are more life prisoners in England and Wales – about 5,500 last time I saw the stats – than the rest of the EU put together. We’ve got ten times more lifers than France, and three times more than Turkey.
Yet we are consistently told that ‘prison works’, just like we were told under the Tories, even when it is clear that the opposite is the case. A progressive government should frame a slightly more rational debate, rather than simply recycle Daily Mail headlines.
I accept prison is not supposed to be easy. But do we really want a prison system that takes sane people and makes them mentally ill? A system so terrible that every year more than 100 people chose to take their own lives rather than finish their sentence?
Truly to be tough on crime would entail an assault on inequality, job insecurity, low pay, bad housing and racism, not further erosion of civil liberties.
And it would mean spending money. Spending money on education, health and drug rehabilitation, that is . Not simply handing over ever-greater handouts to the private prison contractors.
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7 Responses to “Tough on the causes of crime”
Precisely!
Given the effects on families and the often further dinishment of characters of inamtes, it is obvious that imprisonment should be used only where absilutely necessary. We have had a auction between the parties as to who is the more macho in dealing with offenders. And look where it has got us!
The left notoriously fight shy of issues of crime and punishment, so good to see it getting an airing on here.
I don’t think they do, actually. But often they don’t accept that crime is as widespread as many people consider it to be and they insist that this is so regardless of other people’s perception. So they should: if something is exaggerated in the public mind then the only honest approach is to say so.
I used to work in a prison – which was mainly remand prisoners. (It was ten years ago, but if I recall correctly, the national prison population then was under 60,000 – and it was already overcrowded).
Another shocking statistic – at the time, anyway – was that of remand prisoners, about a third would be found innocent, and another third would be released after trial because they’d already served their sentence on remand (not necessarily because they’d been on remand for absurdly long times but sometimes).
A very large number of prisoners were on drug-related charges. If their crime were treated as a health issue rather than a criminal one, it would, I think, vastly reduce the number of prisoners (I’m not talking, obviously, about violent crimes)
Yeah and the issue of prisoners on remand is that they end up there due to over zealous magistrates who don’t want to upset the “bang ‘em up” applecart. And yes, many are found innocent. Mental distress and self-harm has increased as well for prisoners and the women prisoner population has increased as well.
But I do think the left should say more about the privatisation of prisons.
But with the topsy-turvy utterly stupid belief that “prison works” the prison population is bursting at the seams and Reid has had to instruct magistrates to jail less serious offenders (bet that stuck in his throat). But why do they need to bang up these people up anyway? I watched it as a news item last night and there were the beginnings of a moral panic ‘cos “scary people are walking the streets”!
The latest raft of “imaginative” proposals from New Labour include a promise to build another 8,000 prison places by 2011, the abolition of an independent and critical Prison Inspectorate and the emphasis on “victim impact evidence”….
But hey, containment is the name of the game.
The bit about over zealous magistrates wanting to bang people up is a bit of a lazy interpretation of the truth.
The reality is that magistrates are generally a mixed bag, with hang ‘em and flog ‘em types, liberals and individuals with their own pet hates and axes to grind.
The lack of consistency is a real problem. One individual up before one set of magistrates can get a completely different sentence to somebody who may have committed exactly the same offence, in the courtroom next door.
Decisions on whether to give a custodial or a community penalty can often rest on how full the prisons are or what the papers have been saying that morning.
The Criminal Justice System is far from everything we may aspire to, but there are elements in the various component agencies whose point of view will not differ much from Dave’s blog entry. There are even Marxist criminologists and individuals who witness first hand every day how people entwined in an offending lifestyle, largely because of class factors, find it almost impossible to break the negative cycle that results in all too many wasted years being spent behind bars.
Maybe I was being lazy in my intepretation but someone is filling the prisons! I imagine it is the reactionary types without any help from the wooly liberals….
Yes, broadly speaking, magistrates are a mixed bag including geography as well.