I’D LOVE to qualify as the type of person Jack Straw once derided by the generic label of Hampstead liberals; the trouble is, I can only afford to live in Hackney. And there was me thinking that New Labour was not in the business of dampening down aspiration.
Eight years after the famous speech in question, the justice secretary has returned to his favoured pastime of beating up on do-gooders like yours truly. But I do not know know if I am more or less of a middle-class wanker in his eyes, simply because my housing budget extends only to N16 and not NW3.
By way of full disclosure, I have to admit to being a member of the National Council for Civil Liberties. And I’m more than happy to pay the dues that – according to New Labour insinuation, anyway - indirectly fund Shami Chakrabarti’s hot ‘n’ heavy night-time phone sex with David Davis, largely because I support the organisation’s aims.
And while I haven’t joined either, I am sympathetic to what the Howard League for Penal Reform and the National Association for the Care and Resettlement of Offenders are trying to do.
This is despite the fact that I have been both mugged and burgled myself. Now, being a victim of crime is enough to make anybody – yes, even an Independent reader – seriously bloody angry indeed. Rationality on law and order issues flies temporarily out the window.
For about two weeks after each incident, I would have applauded any politician making the kind of ‘some day a real rain is gonna come’ speech Straw has ventured today. Introduction of SWAT squads to enact 24/7 lockdown on the Kingsland Road? Mass internment camps for hoodie-wearing yoof? Bring ‘em on, I would have said.
I guess this natural reaction accounts for why both Tory and Labour figures have for decades repeatedly recycled the same dumb speech that promises to get tough on offenders and lock more people up. It resonates with many voters, that cannot be denied.
But what exactly would they do any differently from what they have been doing? Britain’s incarceration policy is already as tough as they come; about 147 people per 100,000 are in prison in England and Wales, the highest proportion of the population for any country in Western Europe.
We have already got more life prisoners in England and Wales than the rest of the EU manages collectively. There are ten times as many lifers as there are in France, and three times more than in Turkey.
Some 10,000 people are imprisoned every year simply for the possession or sale of soft drugs. Which reminds me, Jack; doesn’t one member of the Straw family have some previous on that score?
New Labour has been relentlessly putting crims away as fast as they can build the jails. More than 17,000 prison spaces have been created since 1997, with a further 8,000 are planned. On present trends, the prison population will reach 100,000 by 2012.
Moreover, by eroding the right to trial by jury, allowing hearsay evidence, and scrapping the double jeopardy rule, the government done everything in its power to make it as easy as possible to secure a conviction.
Yet the fact remains that it costs £40,000 a year to keep a prisoner behind bars, and it’s not clear that the end result is value for money. Forget the familiar platitude that ‘prison works’; it very plainly doesn’t.
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.
For some reason, prison life is routinely caricatured as something out of 1950s holiday camp sitcom Hi-De-Hi!. Here’s yesterday’s Sunday Mirror, trailing today’s Straw speech, for instance:
Prison officers told earlier this year how crooks were breaking INTO cushy jails, where they could get drugs, prostitutes, breakfast in bed and satellite TV.
Sounds good, doesn’t it? I mean, I haven’t got satellite TV. And if I want hookers and charlie, I have to go down Shacklewell Lane, which is all of five minutes walk away. That’s pretty inconvenient when it’s raining.
The reality is rather different. Our penal establishments are so grim that each year, over 100 people kill themselves rather than finish their sentences.
If you want to know why, look at the sort of people that are being imprisoned. Three-quarters of people in prison have a reading age of ten or less. More than 40% are mentally ill, with 10% schizophrenic. Prisoners are 13 times more likely to have been a child in care, 14 times more likely to be unemployed, ten times more likely to have been a regular truant.
In short, the idea that the solution to rising crime rates is to bang ‘em up, and if that doesn’t work, to bang more of ‘em up, has been a spectacular failure. If pointing this inescapable conclusion out makes me a softie who uses ‘language that doesn’t chime with the public’, so be it.
Straw’s speech was a shameless piece of paint-by-numbers sub-Michael Howard vote-grubbing, entirely of a piece with Phil Woolas’s recent outburst on immigration.
I guess that’s always going to be the way for just as long as New Labour allows the parameters of the acceptable to be set by Paul Dacre.
Posted at 14:38, 27 October 2008
Comments (15)
Two facts.
Reported crime has been rising almost relentlessly since the mid-fifties.
Prison population has been rising since the mid-forties.
If prison worked, that wouldn't be so.
I would also add that the number of people esp. women who have died in the prison system. Also the number of children and young people festering away in these private hellholes called Secure Training Centres (STCs)who are subjected to physical restraint.
Around a year ago Pauline Campbell questioned Jack Straw on the number of women who had died in the prison system (he was speaking, incidentally, at the Howard League Prison Reform conference)and good ole Jack got the figure wrong.... and Pauline was able to contradict him.
It shows he knows sweet fa or gives a toss(along with other policies and issues) about how many women have died in the prison system.
But hey, this coming from a man who gets one of his pals (Lord Carter...hatchet man of legal aid)to write policy about the necessity of prison building or "Titans"...the mass warehousing of people specifically the vulnerable and powerless thown into these social dustbins. Rather than be serious about Jean Corston's review he opted for the bang 'em up policy.
And funnily enough, Titans don't work and again it shows Straw has failed in his homework there by not looking globally of the Titan/mega prisons initiatives in the States, France, S. Africa.
They don't work...
"Some 57% of male ex-prisoners are reconvicted within two years, and 68% within four."
That doesn't tell you something doesn't work unless you know what the relative figures are for other action. Given that you still have to be a very serious offender to face jail, comparisons with community service aren't fair. You've probably already had that.
If a new drug for cancer patients whose illness had not responded to other treatments was found to leave 43% of them cancer-free after two years, and 32% of them cancer-free after four, it would probably be hailed as a miracle, rather than something which 'manifestly doesn't work'.
As for the previous poster's complete fiction - the Tories cut the prison population over the 1980s, and crime rocketed - fewer people were serving jail sentences in 1993 than 1981, even without accounting for population growth. More people were on remand, which is a bit illogical but there we are.
Crime has since been falling a little bit each year, this happened after Michael Howard's U-turn and the policy of jailing more criminals and the Labour Government's decision to follow it. Of course economic growth has helped too, but we don't have that any more...
Two opposing views:
'If we take into account the full social and economic cost of allowing persistent offenders to roam free, prison is a bargain.'
CIVITAS: Prison is a bargain, May 2004
http://www.civitas.org.uk/pubs/prisonValue.php
'This research has provided evidence to suggest that for some types of offender alternative interventions can be more effective at reducing re-offending, and better value for money, than basic prison sentences.'
Matrix Knowledge Group: The economic case for and against prison, Nov 2007
http://matrixknowledge.com/wp-content/uploads/the-economic-case-for-and-against-prison_web.pdf
The main difference? The CIVITAS report is complete rubbish, because it a) assumes that the alternative to prison is not-prison; b) it's based on spurious figures from the US. The report from Matrix actually makes sense.
Thanks for raising it. Think I'll do my own post on this.
http://www.parliament.uk/commons/lib/research/rp99/rp99-111.pdf
Prison population fell by a miniscule amount in the 80's, crime had been soaring since the fifties, there is no correlation.
John's view in the comment above that 'comparisons with community sentences are not fair.....You've probably already had that' seems to suggest that sentences become more severe for the same kind of offence, as (usually) magistrates take an increasingly dim view of an offender and decide that 'enough is enough'.
In fact, section 29 of the Criminal Justice Act 1991 made it quite clear that 'a criminal record could not justify a more severe sentence, one disproportionate to the seriousness of the present offence' (The Sentence of the Court: A Handbook for magistrates (2002)p. 117.
While the 1993 changes to the act gave magistrates some leeway in considering 'any failure to respond to previous sentences' (section 151 (1)), the due process for magistrates considering sentence remains to focus primarily on the seriousness of the offence itself, and only secondarily on the offender. This is a key factor in magistrate training around fairness of sentencing. (The training doesn't always work of course.)
Hence, John is wrong to contend that a comparison between the effectiveness of community sentences and prision sentences is invalid. The issue at hand is whether a prison sentence or a suitable community sentence for the same offence is, in general, more (cost) effective. As I've said in an earlier comment, proper research suggests strongly that community sentencing is more effective.
Actually my earlier comment's been held for moderation, possibly cos' it had weblinks in. So make that my later comment, if Dave authorises it.
There is a by election next week, is it a coincidence that we should have a speech about immigration and then one about crime. It's New Labour playing on peoples fears to win votes.
I,m not the same John from a previous comment!
Excellent post, but what puzzles me is - why do tabloid readers lap this stuff up? What is it in low income groups that predisposes them to concentrate all their ire on others struggling at the bottom. Any news of a crackdown on criminals and benefit claimants (which seem to be synonymous) is cheered to the rafters. Where the middle classes seem to protect their own, the working classes like nothing better than to put others down - and politicians play on it.
"What is it in low income groups that predisposes them to concentrate all their ire on others struggling at the bottom."
Because that's who underclass shitbags prey on you dunce.
If they collectively fucked off to the suburbs to mark up/rob from judges, senior public servants, concerned environmentalists and small business owning golf club habituées and I, for one, would be entirely sanguine on the gobshite issue.
So, Paul, explain today's report of Judge Shaun Smith, prevented from sending a burglar to prison, because, in his own words, of it being a first offence.
"I want to send you to prison. The public want to see you to go prison. But I can't send you to prison because of the guidelines I have been given"
I'm not a legal expert but, yes, this is the 'leeway' I talked about, and you've chosen the offence where this is most emphasised. The guidelines fomr the Sentencing Advisory Panel (2005) say: 'The record of the offender is of more significance in the case of domestic burglary than in the case of some other offences.'
See http://www.sentencing-guidelines.gov.uk/guidelines/other/courtappeal/default.asp?T=Cases&catID=8&subject=Burglary. In this you'll see the guidelines still do focus primarily on the offence, notwithstanding the above, and that some first time burglaries do get a prison-first guideline.
But my point was about general comparability, not individual sentencing guidelines, and the general point about seriousness of offence being the main factor in sentence holds true.
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