The case against cutting prison numbers

Philip Walker

But how many of those 8,500 crimes are creations of the last government? If there's a lot of Asbo breaching and photographing in public places in that list, your case gets rather weaker.

Joseph

The above will all be proved wrong if in the cutting of short sentences rehabilitation is instead introduced.

That is surely the only way for a real cut in both crime and cost.

strapworld

So, Mr Hoskins, you believe it right that our prisons contain people who have not paid their council tax? or not paid their television licence(tax)? There are so many similar offences for which we can be jailed.These should be de-criminalised and made civil offences.

It is right that we have a serious debate and not what you are attempting to do- stir up the hang em and flog em supporters!

As a former policeman I do believe that Clarke is right. I believe that far too many, young people especially,are jailed under the drugs legislation. This ruins their lives. Drugs should be de-criminalised. That would reduce the prison population greatly! and also reduce much crime being committed.And making criminals millionaires!

Alcohol kills far more than drugs. Alcohol creates far greater stress on the NHS than drugs.But Alcohol is such a major part of the exchequer it will never be curtailed.

Prison does not work. Only people who are a real danger to the public should be jailed.

We have to look at alternative measures, such as chemically castrating rapists!!

alexsandr

Prison is not a deterrant.
They need to take away the TV's in cells, the mobile phones, take a proper crusade against drug abuse in prison.
Prison needs to be a wretched existance to work, not 6 months in a holiday camp.

HJ

"the average prisoner commits a remarkable 140 crimes per year before incarceration"

This may be true, but using averages tells us little. It may be that half of prisoners commit an average of 280 crimes before going to prison and the rest go to prison on a first offence. It also doesn't tell us what sort of offences people are sent to prison for.

It is quite feasible that we could and/or should be much tougher and more willing to put people in prison for certain types of offences, whilst avoiding prison altogether for certain other types of offences for which other punishments might be more appropriate - especially those for which short prison sentences are often used, as we know that short prison sentences tend to be ineffective either in protecting the public (because they're not inside for very long) or for reform.

Swiss Bob

Strapworld, hear, hear,

One problem I can see with legalising drugs is that your average policeman would lose a huge portion of their income:-)

Osred

Clever left liberal people like Clarke told us for years that long sentences were no good because after the initial shock of prison the offender acclimatises, accepts it, learns more criminality then re-offends as soon as he gets out.

Now he (and other left liberals) are claiming that short sentences are no good because they dont give enough time to achieve rehabilitation so we mustn't jail them.

We have had 40 years of left/liberal experimentation with various pre, during and after prison regimes. Has crime reduced since 1970?

There is only 1 cast iron guaranteed policy that gives the public some protection - Prison. While locked up they dont commit crimes against society. I dont care what they do inside. If they re-offend on release you lock them up - straightaway. Its their choice they can always take personal responsibility and go straight.

As the Spectator article shows, its cost effective to lock people up when measured against the costs of dealing with re-offending after early release and during those laughable 'community sentences' spent in front of Jeremy Kyle.

Why the hell is Clarke in the Tory party?

And he is a disgrace to ale drinkers.

jaybs

Never did I think a Party I support and worked to get into Power would become Weak on Crime, through bad communication seem as if they are attacking the genuine disabled in our society and causing them unnecessary stress.

Many in our Party seem to have their heads in the sand! they are most interested in attacking Obama or Biden???

denis cooper

So we'll have fewer police making it more difficult for them to catch criminals, and when criminals are caught and convicted they'll be given softer sentences.

Both of which will increase the number of criminals at large at any time, and will further weaken the deterrent effect of detection and punishment, and will therefore encourage more crime.

There are the makings of an upward spiral in criminality here, eventually leading to the police being completely overwhelmed and a widespread collapse of law and order.

Isn't this more or less how we got that elevenfold increase in crime between ca 1950 and 1992?

Because once crime is allowed to get out of control, it naturally auto-accelerates and becomes even more out of control, and it becomes increasingly difficult and expensive for the state to bring it back under control.

Eventually it may become impossible for the state to restore law and order without resorting to military force, and in the worst cases of failed states that may mean bringing in an outside military force.

We're still a long way from that - although I've no doubt that Clarke would be perfectly willing to see the European Gendarmerie Force deployed here - but we should make damn sure that we stay a long way from that, and get and stay as far away from that cliff edge as possible.

As for the so-called "war on drugs" which has become a major driver for criminality - that was lost a long time ago and a completely new strategy is required, but few politicians have the courage to say that publicly.

TrevorsDen

I mostly agree with strapworld, but I do not agree with decriminalising drugs. Alcohol is a problem and its example shows what we might expect in spades if we decriminalised drugs.

I am not sure the tories or Clarke are saying 'no punishment', merely that for some that punishment need not include jail.

jaybs -- Our jails are corrupt and we need to clean them up. We also are in the middle of a vast financial crisis. Ho=w can we blindly continue with dogma? we need to be realistic and practical.

Serious criminals need to be seriously punished and of course it would help if the serious criminals were caught in the first place. Police resources need to mbe properly applied.

TheE17Tory

Yoyr figures really don't add up here. Your costs savings are based on a criminal committing 140 crimes per year, every year...pretty sure that doesn't happen for all but a tiny amount of the most hardened of criminals.

Clear Memories

Prison, for a free and democratic society, serves a number of purposes.

The generally accepted views are that, in a free society, the removal of freedom is a clear signal of society's disapproval and perhaps the greatest condemnation such a society can bring down on a individual. That removal of personal freedom also prevents the committing of further crimes. A period of incarceration also allows for the re-education of the criminal before release back into society.

If Clarke et al now disavow these supposed givens and (a) no longer believe they work and (b)

Jane

I worked with offenders for over 30 years. Ken Clarke is absolutely right regarding the inappropriateness of sending people who are a public nuisance but who do not present a risk being incarcerated. What we are doing is spending scarce public resources unwisely in order to meet the demand from the tabloid press.

I have lived through and worked during many cycles with the inevitable debate between punishment v rehabilitation - short sharp shock treatment, theraputic regimes to cure offenders etc etc. All research suggests that many young people grow out of crime. What we as a society have to do is decide how best to manage young people who are the ones committing offences.

An analysis of crime statistics suggests that crime has fallen over many years. The increase some of you mention relates to new legislation - often petty such as being imprisoned for non payment of tv licence, council tax etc. The commission of such crimes does not warrant a prison sentence but failure to pay the financial penalty does. Further, we have insufficient beds in the mental health sector. Many mentally disordered offenders end up on remand not because of the alleged offence but for their own safety.

We have a failed deportation system for illegal immigrants and for those foreign prisoners who have committed offences. This has also increased the population of our prisons.

In addition, the last government brought in a public protection sentence which is indeterminate - (similar to a life sentence). It was envisaged that this sentence would only relate to serious sex offenders etc whose offence would not attract a life sentence but who were considered to be of serious risk of harm to the public. Paedophiles are often given such sentences. We have far too many people being placed in prison under this sentence (if in doubt etc etc) and it was insufficently resourced. As a result, we have been successfully sued by inmates who have not progressed through the prison system correctly. Such sentences demand review at given points...

We do not have a more criminal society than other European countries. The last government needed to demonstarte that they would be tough on crime and it was under their watch that the prison population was permitted to grow. If we really want to make our society safer, we need to reduce the prison population to permit prison staff to work with those incarcerated and reduce their propensity to reoffend. What we are doing is housing people at great expense. We need to expand bail provision and hostel accommodation. this should be done by the private sector as public provision is much more costly.

I could go on... I would ask you all to consider whether someone who is a public nuisance and who could be managed in the community deserves to have over £40,000 spent on their housing. I am as ionterested in a safe community as others. Locking nuisances up up does not protect any of us.

denis cooper

I can't agree that those who refuse to comply with court orders, including the imposition of fines, should be exempt from imprisonment as an ultimate sanction.

TheE17Tory

Dennis, if people refuse to pay fines then the courts should be able to force sale of any assets they have. Im not sure if courts do have this power or not? If they don't have any assets, then their benefits go straight to paying off the fine.

Cuffleyburgers

Everything strapworld writes.

Prison should be reserved for crimes of violence, and grand larceny and fraud.

And in prison there should be no drugs, no alcohol, no cigarettes, no satellite television the latter being treated as luxury which can be purchased using prison money earned sewing prison uniforms or something. Prisoners should be encouraged to grow their own food, and take exercise, and study, do exams.

EyeSee

Overall, Clarke is a twerp and this is just par for the course for him. Like Blair he makes tosh sound reasonable, but we need to think for ourselves. Clarke says that locking people up is Victorian. Many Victorians are responsible for reform bodies alive today. Further, he says that we should seek to change them. Well, for a lot of prisoners the lack of punishment for their criminal actions is why they re-offend, so harsh prisons and proper sentences will work, it will modify their thinking. I agree though that judges are way too quick to lock up people for minor matters and agonising about whether murderers should be locked up. The only reason 'prison doesn't work' is because the criminal justice system unendingly seeks to undermine it.

steveal

"The latest European Union figures, collected three years ago, show England and Wales to have the third-highest crime rate in Europe."

So banging-em-up isn't working too well, is it?

denis cooper

TheE17Tory, I find that as far as magistrates are concerned it's explained very clearly here:

http://www.traffordmagistrates.info/html/body_paying_fines.html

"FINES SET BY THE COURT ARE BASED ON THE SERIOUSNESS OF THE OFFENCE AND THE FINANCIAL MEANS OF THE DEFENDANT.
THEY ARE PAYABLE ON THE DAY OF IMPOSITION AND AN OFFENDER WHO HAS BEEN FINED SHOULD BE PREPARED TO DISCHARGE THE FULL AMOUNT AT COURT ON THE DAY OF IMPOSITION

To help to achieve this, the following enforcement sanctions are now available to the Court:

Automatic Deductions from Benefit

Automatic Attachment to Earnings

Fine Registration (which may affect Credit worthiness)

Clamping (an order for the sale of a vehicle can only be made by the magistrates)

Up to 50% Fine Increase

Fines Payment Work"

And at the bottom:

"Please Note:
Failure to pay any fine imposed by the court will render you liable to arrest and your money and goods may be seized by bailiffs at your expense. If the court has granted time to pay, you must comply strictly with the terms stated."

Kittler

Eleven times more crime now than in the fifties? I doubt that, a lot more bureaucratic recording of 'crime' probably. What was dealt with by a kick in the arse in the fifties is now a statistic.

denis cooper

jane @ 11:54 am makes some very good points.

As far as drugs-related offences are concerned, last week's Maidenhead Advertiser had a two-page spread headed:

"'Pervasive problem' of drugs crime"

"Drug addicts are responsible for almost all the incidences of burglary and car crime in the Royal Borough, acccording to the borough's top cop Superintendent Tim De Meyer ..."

Later, direct quotes from the Superintendent:

"Ninety per cent of our burglary and car crime is linked to someone trying to feed a drug habit."

"The benefit of a good burglary conviction is it is taken very seriously by the court so we tend to see people go away for a couple of years. With car crime we see sentences that are more minor so we see a volatile pattern of offending with people in and out of custody all the time."

About "prolific offenders":

"My officers focus on a core group of 10 but that's not to say there aren't more. We focus on the people we think are committing the most burglaries and car crime. We do surveillance, visit them or officers in uniform may follow them about all day to make sure they are aware they are being watched."

Bloody crazy; if a drug addiction drives somebody to crime, then on conviction the court should be able to impose a sentence of secure detention until he's cured of that addiction, plus a lifelong ban on him using addictive drugs, plus a prolonged period after release when he must report regularly for testing.

denis cooper

@ Kittler, homicide has never been dealt with by a kick in the arse, but the homicide rate has increased by the same order of magnitude. There are now as many or more killings each year just in London than there used to be in the whole of the country.

Mr L

I wish some of the people who go on about this subject actually had some experience of it - as I do because I sit as a JP.

We send some people to jail because we have run out of other options, these being serial offenders; we take the view that even if the offenders will not be rehabilitated, at least we are protecting the public, shopkeepers, householders and others for the time the offender is inside. Quite commonly community penalties don't work: you can't curfew unless there is a reliable address; if people are on ESA or the equivalent (or drugs) they are not normally accepted for unpaid work in the community; and so on.

Some of the people we send to jail should be in mental institutions, but most of these were closed down under the dreadful 'care in the community' thing, which in practice means no care at all.

David Lindsay

Light sentences and lax prison discipline are both expressions of the perfectly well-founded view that large numbers of those convicted, vastly in excess of the numbers that have always existed at any given time, are in fact innocent.

We need to return to a free country's minimum requirements for conviction, above all by reversing the erosion of the right to silence and of trial by jury, and by repealing the monstrous provisions for anonymous evidence and for conviction by majority verdict. And we need to return to proper policing.

Then we could and should return to proper sentencing, and to proper regimes in prison. But only then.

Verity

No, David Lindsay; we need to return to the death penalty. This gets rid of a certain percentage of scrotes permanently and concentrates the minds of others.

David Cameron will not do anything that involves putting Britain first, because he puts himself first, and he wants to have a glowing career among the Belges when his (hopefully short) stint of prime minister is thankfully terminated.

sean schofield

The justice of the peace person commentating freely admits that with the closure of secure accomodation for the mentaly ill, in his/her view the next best alternative is prison, what a sick indicment of maladministration in todays society, two wrongs never make a right.
Haveing served a short prison sentance myself to highlight just how failed the criminal or so called criminal justice system is, now more than ever the fiscal issue has been rightly addressed.
I am so proud to have undermined the full so called majesty of the law by being a bloody nuisance over the cannabis laws and i considered it my public duty to undermine all those parasites who have lived high on the hog for a long time makeing a liveing in this enviroment.
I bet the hang em and flog em brigade are fumeing, now its going to be a great deal more difficult to dupe the public into believing that they are providing a public duty/service.
None of the states concern if i choose to smoke a forest of dope, by the way there is adequate provision in law already re drug driving, burgalry or other offences against the person.(so drug crime is an oxymoran)
Once again i wish to point out how proud and patriotic i consider my actions that led to my internment , because ultimatly it has bought about change.
By the way i stopped smoking cannabis, purely for health reasons, nothing whatsoever to do with the law and punishment.

IXION

I have a challenge. There is some rule somwhere that when someone on a thread Likens another poster to the Nazis then the thread is over.

let us try to have a debate about Law and Order without someone saying string em up, or (I'm not a peodophile sadist but..) beating young boys with a wip sounds like a good idea.

We have vastly too many criminal offences, redicuoulsy over charged by the CPS.

dcandersson

Dennis Cooper,

What utter tosh you write. The murder rate has remained increased slightly over the last fifty years from about 10 to 14 deaths per million people in the UK.

Vile peddling of lies will help no-one.

Daniel

Mr L

@ sean schofield

I did not say that I wanted to send people to prison as the next best thing to mental institutions. Many of them shouldn't be in the criminal justice system at all - that is the point. Then the question of imprisonment would not arise.

Paul Boizot

denis cooper June 30th, 2010 2:14pm writes;

"if a drug addiction drives somebody to crime, then on conviction the court should be able to impose a sentence of secure detention until he's cured of that addiction, plus a lifelong ban on him using addictive drugs, plus a prolonged period after release when he must report regularly for testing."

Do you have any experience of addiction? What do you think the effect on an addict of a lifelong ban on using addictive drugs would be? And what is your sanction when the ban is broken? And do you mean addictive drugs, or illegal addictive drugs?

Paul Boizot

Mr L June 30th, 2010 3:39pm; "Some of the people we send to jail should be in mental institutions, but most of these were closed down under the dreadful 'care in the community' thing, which in practice means no care at all."

Why has there been no political payback for this awful back-of-the-envelope policy? It was the ides of the Tory government under Mrs. Thatcher, wasn't it?

denis cooper

Paul Boizet @ 8:41 pm -

No. So what? Are you saying that a drug addiction is incurable?

The sanction is a return to secure detention and treatment, obviously.

I mean any substance, legal or illegal, to which he could become addicted - given his demonstrated predisposition to addiction - and which could lead him back into crime.

Of course there would have to an exception for medications properly and necessarily prescribed, with close supervision.

Marcher Baron

As others have pointed out, many prisoners should really be in a mental home. Increasing the number of care facilities would be one way of lowering prison numbers and actually benefitting the people concerned. There should be no Sky TV in prisons and I believe inmates should be taught a trade and made to work, some of their earnings being taken to contribute towards bed and board. Those with a drug habit should be cured of it. All foreign nationals who have committed crimes should be deported to their country of origin with no right of return, no ifs, no buts. Locking people up does at least keep the perpetrator out of circulation and give the victims some respite.

denis cooper

dcandersson @ 6:56 pm -

Figure 1.1 on page 2 of this Home Office report shows the number of recorded homicides each year in England and Wales between 1951 and 2003:

http://rds.homeoffice.gov.uk/rds/pdfs05/hosb0205.pdf

and the increase was from about 300 a year to about 1000 a year.

Fifty years ago, 1960, it was actually at its lowest point of about 270.

I accept that was only a threefold increase, not tenfold, since 1951, but that is far larger than the increase you suggest.

Taking your figure of 14 per million and the population for England and Wales as 52 million, you're short by nearly 300 homicides.

It should also be borne in mind that many victims who would have died in 1951 can now be saved through medical advances.

IXION

Dennis Cooper some points

1 Population UK up 50% on 1960
so reduce rate per population accordingly
2 Policing detection, forensics, vastly more thorough than 1960 an awful lot of "accidents" and Natural causes would now be treatred as murders.
3 many things that were accidents would now be treated as Manslaughter, charging standards now vastly more draconian.
4 Lies, damn lies and statistics

denis cooper

@ IXION -

1. Population of England and Wales was actually up by only 13% between 1961 and 2001, the closest date to the 2003 end of the chart in the Home Office report.

Census results:

1951 - 43.8 million
1961 - 46.1 million
2001 - 52.0 million

From the chart the number of recorded homicides rose by a factor of about 3.3 between 1961 and 2001, which corrected for population growth would mean that the rate per milllion rose by about 2.9.

dcandersson's figure of about 10 per million fifty years ago is incorrect - it was actually about 6, the lowest being 5.7 in 1961.

2. and 3. - Overall the reverse is probably true. While you may be right that a small number of deaths which would previously have passed as accidental are now detected and recorded as offences, some homicides which would previously have been classed as murder have been downgraded to manslaughter.

seanschofield

Mr.L,
Please accept my apologies for the incorrect inference i made, unfortunatly i had a disgraceful experience at the hands of a moronic magistrate , so much so that i left England 6 years ago and only return on occasion to visit my elderly parents.
My view is very simple ,the criminal justice system at all levels is full of wannabees and a thorough cleansing of the system from top to bottom is not only neccersary but should in fact be mandatory,
Somewhat of an expert on the drug war as i have cannabis offences going back to 1984,
Will freely concede that it was my choice to break the law ,what i did not understand
at a young age was the long term effect that what is considered today (possession ) as a minor transgression has completly altered my whole life, career and long term outlook, i can assure you that apart from makeing the normal (non mentaly ill) user ratty/bad tempered
it is relativley benign re mental health, have been accused of haveing links to terrorism/paedophilia, organised crime and you would be astounded at the allegations laid at my door in the last few years, and to hear the likes of Jack Straw and his (grubby drug dealing son) moralising from on high (no pun intended) tends to leave the likes of me in a vomit induceing state of mind.
So please accept my apologies for makeing the same mistake to you as others have to me.

angela

i think the reason for the bad crime with the younsters their mentle state is not good because of drugs instead of helping them they put in jail just a waste of time theres no jobs its all right saying there are but if your under 25 try and get one they cant get affordible housing let alone private as they can only have 55 pound a week towards rent its no wonder they turn to crime