The election campaign is expected to start this month, but the NS and the Institute for Public Policy Research bring you something better: the debates that the politicians always fudge. This week - criminal justice
Prison is a waste. By Clare Sparks
Twenty-five years ago, crime and criminal justice policy would scarcely have figured in the pre-election discourse. Now, the debate is polarised and politicised, with politicians constantly trying to "out-tough" one another. And the consequences are damaging, particularly for sentencing and penal policy. Labour has aimed to "tackle crime and the causes of crime". But the desire to tackle the causes has been undermined by simultaneous attempts to outdo the right in punishment and incarceration.
It was Michael Howard, as Tory home secretary, who set the pace. He announced in 1993 that "prison works" and thus reversed the view of Douglas Hurd, one of his predecessors, that "prison is an expensive way of making bad people worse". In the following five years, the prison population rose by 50 per cent.
But if prison really did work, England and Wales would have one of the most successful criminal justice systems in Europe. We currently imprison just under 165,000 people at any one time - 125 per 100,000 of the population. Contrast this figure with the equivalents for our European partners: 110 in Spain; 95 in Germany; 90 in France, Italy and Holland; 80 in Belgium; 70 in Greece; 65 in Denmark; and 60 in Sweden and Norway. In Europe, only Portugal jails a higher proportion of its population than we do.
Prison is not working. The majority of prisoners (55 per cent of adults and 75 per cent of young prisoners) are back before the courts within two years of being released from custody. Some commentators would no doubt argue that the answer is longer sentences - at least while offenders are in custody they cannot commit crime. But this simplistic argument does not stand up to close examination. The Home Office calculates that "a change in the use of custody of the order of 25 per cent would be needed to produce a 1 per cent change in the level of crime". A price worth paying, some might suggest - but, at a cost of £24,000 per prisoner per year to the taxpayer, it is a very high price.
In contrast, the most effective community penalties reduce the likelihood of reoffending by up to 20 per cent, through intensive supervision and support. Society also benefits from getting around six million free hours of community work each year. Further, community penalties enable offenders and their families to maintain the very structures around them that might prevent offending in future. Being sentenced to a community penalty does not mean losing your job, or your tenancy, and it does not have the devastating impact of financial hardship on the offender's family.
Community penalties are also much more cost-effective, at £2,000 to £4,000. If the prison population were reduced to the level it was in 1993, and more offenders given community penalties, savings in the region of £460m could be made. This sum of money invested in crime-prevention measures could pay for pre-school education for 150,000 "high risk" children; provide support for 50,000 vulnerable families; enable 20,000 excluded pupils to get intensive educational support; run 400 Safer Cities programmes; and install upgraded security in 300,000 homes.
It is the rising cost of imprisonment that has finally caused the growth in incarceration in California to slow. People have begun to realise that public money is better invested in schools and hospitals than in incarcerating countless people for minor drugs offences.
It is undoubtedly the case that our prisons hold some of the most dangerous people in the country, but they also hold some of the most damaged. Overwhelmingly, those people who end up in prison have a history of local authority care, unemployment, truancy or exclusion from school, and drug dependence.
Ninety per cent of young people in prison have mental health or substance misuse problems. Last year in prisons, there were 5,175 incidents of self-harm and 81 people committed suicide - 39 of these were on remand and had not yet been convicted of any crime at all. Even if such a system were successful in reducing crime, we would surely need to question its validity in terms of more fundamental values of justice, legality and respect for human dignity - as Andrew Rutherford argues in the IPPR's new report Criminal Justice Choices.
Our goal should be to embed our approach to tackling crime within a wider social exclusion policy. A progressive response to offending would limit the use of imprisonment to those who are a danger to the public. To deprive a person of liberty, and thereby exclude him or her from society, should be the last resort of the criminal justice system. It has little success in preventing reoffending, it is expensive and it causes great social harm.
The vast majority of sentenced prisoners would be better dealt with by community sentences, which are not only more likely to divert them from crime but promote the very social inclusion to which the government aspires.
Clare Sparks is a research fellow at the Institute for Public Policy Research
Why prison works. By Theodore Dalrymple
It is difficult to convince complacent middle-class intellectuals of the degree to which life in the poorest third of our society is dominated and further impoverished by crime and criminality. Fear of crime in our public housing estates, for example, is not a symptom of an irrational anxiety neurosis, as has sometimes condescendingly been claimed by liberal criminologists: it is a condition of survival. Crime rules, but it is not OK.
My experience of being consulted by thousands of people in a poor and crime-ridden area, and of medical practice in a prison, convinces me of the sheer cruelty of showing leniency towards crime. It is cruel to victim and perpetrator alike, and makes existence in much of Britain a living hell.
Leniency is cruel to victims because it indicates that the state does not take their suffering seriously. When a shop assistant is half strangled by a gang of youths, who then receive only a caution from the police, she naturally feels that the state does not value her safety or peace of mind very highly. Leniency also fosters an atmosphere of intimidation. "Remember," says the criminal who expects a light sentence, "I'll be walking the same streets as you in six weeks." It is therefore a brave witness who testifies. Indeed, the atmosphere on British housing estates is almost indistinguishable from that in British prisons. To testify against anyone is to grass him up, even if he has stolen from you, beaten or tortured you.
Leniency is bad for criminals, too. It teaches them nothing. It fails to deter them. It does not even keep them out of circulation long enough to reduce significantly the numbers of the crimes they commit. The shortness of their individual sentences means that they can be taught nothing useful during any of them. It is worth remembering in this context that the vast majority of criminals cease their criminal activity (for whatever reason) by about the age of 35.
While it is true that criminals tend to come from poor and unhappy backgrounds, they are not therefore unconscious beings who know not what they do. On the contrary, they know perfectly well that what they do is wrong, but calculate that it is still worth doing it, in large part because they get away with so much. Most of the prisoners admit to me with perfect frankness that they have committed between five and 15 times as many car thefts, burglaries or assaults as they have ever been charged with.
The intelligent ones have often committed even more: it is not uncommon to meet a burglar who has broken into 200 houses. And is 18 months' imprisonment so very harsh a sentence for having broken into between 15 and 45 houses (the average number broken into by the third strike that results in a mandatory sentence)?
When I describe to people who favour leniency towards criminals the cases I encounter several times each day of my professional life, and ask them what they think is the appropriate punishment for them, they always reply by suggesting punishment several times more severe than anything meted out by our courts. They are rightly appalled, for example, that a man who throws acid in his girlfriend's face should receive a sentence of four months' imprisonment, of which he has to serve only two, when it is perfectly clear that his behaviour on his release will not improve. Those who favour leniency do not seem to realise that such conduct is, in certain quarters, almost the norm: in my work, for example, I have been consulted by perhaps 5,000 men who have been violent to women (the majority of these men have been violent also to others, and have paid either no penalty at all or so trifling a one as not to be discouraged). De jure leniency is de facto impunity.
There is nothing in the least unjust about severe punishment, provided it is administered by due process. Indeed, if justice has anything to do with desert, there are tens of thousands of people in this country who are unjustly at liberty: and the more leniently criminals are dealt with, the more of them there will be.
Unhappily, due process in this country is being eroded as a direct consequence of leniency. In a vain effort to stem the tide of crime, the right to silence has been abolished. The abandonment of jury trials, the permission of double jeopardy and the establishment of preventive detention have all been mooted. None of this would be necessary if lawlessness were taken seriously in the first place.
Leniency also promotes another unpleasant phenomenon: that of vigilantism and of people taking the law into their own hands. Denied satisfaction and elementary justice by our legal system, they give way to primitive vengeance. For vigilantes, there are no laws of evidence and no presumption of innocence: everyone is guilty if they think so. Those who believe in leniency therefore also promote baseball-bat justice.
Yet though they imagine themselves to be the friends of the underdog, nothing could be further from the truth. They always forget that while the poor commit more crime than the rich, they also suffer more crime than the rich. Since criminals usually commit crimes against many people, there are vastly more victims than perpetrators. Those who favour leniency indulge in the warm glow of generosity at the expense of others. It is compassion masking indifference.
Theodore Dalrymple is a prisons doctor in Birmingham
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