BRITAIN HAS LOST THE PLOT

One of the key public concerns voiced in the general election campaign was Britain’s unacceptably high crime rate. Long-suffering communities believe that not only are they suffering from epidemic crime and disorder, but to add insult to injury criminals are not dealt with effectively even when they are caught. Now, a senior police officer has lent his authority to the suspicion that the courts have simply lost the plot. Paul Kernaghan, chief constable of Hampshire, has made the remarkably outspoken charge that judges and magistrates appear to be more concerned with the needs of criminals than their victims, and in particular are simply refusing to lock up serial offenders.

As an example, he highlighted the case of one such criminal in his area who, despite having 120 previous convictions, was sentenced to merely 14 days in jail. In an alarming number of cases, serious repeat offenders are not even sent to prison. In Winchester, a teenager who was caught trying to sell heroin and crack cocaine was given a two-year supervision order after Judge Andrew Barnett said he was ‘giving him a chance’. In Manchester, Judge Stuart Fish told a pair of serial criminals with more than 100 convictions between them that he would not jail them because it would cost too much money and previous sentences had not stopped their crime spree. So for attacking a woman and stealing her benefits money, they walked away with rehabilitation orders and community punishments. And in a particularly appalling case last month, a man was finally jailed in Leeds for murdering two sisters and an elderly couple — after having previously been given only a community sentence and probation for a vicious knife attack.

It seems scarcely credible that such criminals are being given such derisory sentences, which bear no relation to the gravity of these crimes and fail to lock up people who pose a danger to the public. The judges protest that they are not soft sentencers at all, and point to the fact that Britain imprisons more people than any other European country. This claim is disingenuous. True, we jail more people per head of population than in the rest of Europe. But that is simply because we suffer far more crime than those countries do. So it’s not surprising that more people in total are locked up.

The much more telling question, however, is whether we jail those who commit that crime as often as other countries jail their own criminals. And here the figures show that our rate of imprisonment per crime is well below the European average. So faced with one of the highest crime rates in the industrialised world, our courts are sending people to prison less frequently. Might there not be, just possibly, a connection between the one trend and the other? .....
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So what on earth is causing our judges and magistrates — supposedly pillars of a prudent establishment — to behave in such an irresponsible way? As Mr Kernaghan suggested, one reason is their obsession with keeping prison numbers down because of the chronic overcrowding in our jails. No one disputes that this is indeed a serious problem. But the obvious solution is therefore to build more prisons. Instead, the bureaucratic tail is wagging the criminal justice dog. As Mr Kernaghan said, if someone needs to be locked up it is absurd not to do so because no cell is available. Yet the justice system is indeed suspending punishment because there isn’t enough capacity.

However, that is not the only reason. For like so much of the criminal justice establishment, the judges are gripped by a visceral distaste for prison. The Lord Chief Justice, Lord Woolf, has repeatedly advocated community sentences for non-violent offenders. This is because of a profound belief that prisons are merely ‘universities of crime’ that make bad people worse and thus even more likely to commit offences. Community sentences are therefore considered to be more effective. However, all the evidence contradicts this. The distressing fact is that neither prison nor community sentences have much success in preventing criminals from committing more crime. But at least while they are in prison, the community has some relief from their activities; and at least these offenders are being punished.

But then, to the bien-pensant criminal justice establishment, the notion of punishment itself is viewed with utter contempt as no more than a primitive lust for vengeance, and therefore deeply uncivilised. Yet inflicting a measure of pain commensurate with the crime is an essential part of justice. No punishment, no justice. And as any parent knows, punishment for misdeeds is an essential part of the process by which a child learns the distinction between right and wrong and becomes a civilised human being. Hence, no punishment, no civil society.....

Sentencing is not the only aspect of the criminal justice system which has lost its way. After all, very few crimes end up being prosecuted in court at all. That’s because at every stage the system fails — including the police, whose performance leaves much to be desired....

Our criminal justice system is currently mired in a combination of bureaucratic inertia, political pusillanimity and ideological perversity. Hapless citizens run the gauntlet of a crime wave dismissed as an exaggeration by a disdainful and out-of-touch establishment, which regards calls for imprisonment as further evidence of unsophistication. Accordingly, it is delivering a sentencing policy which enables criminals to thumb their noses at the system, and is now increasingly making a mockery of justice itself.

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