(London Times article 9-6-11)
The problem is not how long we keep hardened criminals inside but that we keep locking up the wrong people
On political arguments about crime, I offer you an axiom: both sides are always right. Prison works but also it doesn’t. Crime can be explained by background; crime is the fault of the criminal. We need to be tough on crime; we need to release prisoners.
Perhaps Kenneth Clarke, the Justice Secretary, tried this defence as the Prime Minister was telling him to abandon his plan to cut sentences in half in return for an early guilty plea. Mr Clarke wants to reduce the prison population by 3,000. However, Andrew Cooper, the Downing Street strategy supremo, a man who dreams in data, has shown the Prime Minister the numbers: the public overwhelmingly hate the policy. It’s so unpopular that Liberal Democrat voters are the only group in favour.
David Cameron, of course, is right. But so is Mr Clarke, as long as he realises that, by concentrating on sentencing policy, he is looking in the wrong place. Lenient sentencing can only make a serious dent in the prison population at a price in lost popularity that Mr Cameron will never be prepared to pay.
This latest policy reversal shows that the no-longer-nasty Conservative Party doesn’t quite know how to deal with crime. It is telling that Mr Cameron’s crime speech next week will be his first on the topic since he became Prime Minister. Obsessed with broke Britain, he has had no time for broken Britain. Aware that his rebranding rests on liberal civility, he has been reluctant to talk tough.
His predecessors had no such qualms. Throughout Margaret Thatcher’s time in office, crime was a Tory issue. The Tories were in the lead on it for 15 years. At its widest, the lead over Labour was 39 percentage points. This was because Mrs Thatcher’s ministers were clear on an essential point: individuals are responsible for their criminal acts. They dismissed Labour’s insistence that crime was a disease with social causes.
The Tory lead on crime suddenly evaporated in the summer of 1994, when Tony Blair became leader of the Labour Party. The famous slogan “tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime” was a perfect description of the fact that both sides were right. Poverty is powerfully associated with criminal behaviour, but equally the economic cycle commits no crimes. Property crime was much lower in the 1930s than in the 1960s.
It was crucial to Labour that it rediscovered individual responsibility. Indeed, it used to irritate Mr Blair immensely that the Home Office would argue that crime was inevitable in bad times as people were poor and inevitable in good times because there was just so much stuff to steal.
Labour retained its lead for most of Mr Blair’s tenure. Gordon Brown always believed that public anxiety about crime was exaggerated. He thought that talking about crime merely encouraged it. Labour’s lead on crime collapsed under his leadership. The public teach politicians an inescapable and obvious truth. They care a lot about crime, and they hate it.
The political class has responded to this with a 20-year experiment in policy, and here is the opportunity for the Justice Secretary. In 1992, when Mr Clarke was Home Secretary, there were 44,000 people in prison. Now there are 85,000. This huge change was initiated by Lord Howard of Lympne, who was unequivocal that prison worked.
Lord Howard was and is right. Prison has three functions and it serves them well. It is a punishment for malfeasants. It protects the public by keeping dangerous characters off the streets. And it reduces crime because at least some criminals are locked up.
But Lord Howard was also wrong. Prison does not work in the sense that half of all inmates offend again within a year of being released. It doesn’t work in the sense that British prisoners receive no rehabilitation. Nobody is writing Pilgrim’s Progress inside. Too many of them can’t read it, let alone write it.
The central problem with prison, which should exercise Mr Clarke much more than the length of sentences, is that too many of the wrong people are incarcerated. There are three distinct types of prisoner: immature boys, people in dire need of help and career criminals. The task of penal policy should be to stop the first two ending up in prison and turning into the third.
At any one time, young men make up about half the prison population and plenty of them ought not to be in there. If community punishment were better, which is to say more instantly unpleasant and properly enforced, then a custodial stay could often be averted, at lower cost. Even expensive community orders cost less than a third of a place inside. It would help, too, if we updated our Victorian idea of the prison. Jeremy Bentham threw away most of his fortune on the “panopticon”, a prison in which the circular design meant that inmates didn’t need to be watched. GPS technology means that we can now confine people effectively without walls. Prisoners who aren’t dangerous can be invigilated, while paying their own board and lodging. If we did this better, we could take 20,000 people out of prison without being soft on crime.
Then a further 30 per cent or so of prisoners should be discharged at once. These are people for whom prison is the wrong place. Nobody with a mental health problem or in the grip of drug or alcohol addiction should be in prison. They need treatment and help. And it no more makes sense to imprison 1,300 people for defaulting on fines than it did when Charles Dickens wrote Little Dorrit.
That leaves about 20 per cent of the prison population who are hardened career criminals. All these numbers come with caveats because the Home Office, incredibly, doesn’t have reliable data. But we really do know that 100,000 persistent offenders commit half of all crime and that most of them are at liberty at any given time. The authorities know exactly who most of these people are and the future of policing must surely lie in more forensic concentration on prolific offenders.
This is the way that we can have condign punishment for the criminal and reduce the numbers behind bars. Get those for whom prison works inside and those for whom it doesn’t out.
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