The liberal lynch mob

John Reid declared last week that his ‘starting point’ on convicted paedophiles was ‘that information [related to their whereabouts] should no longer remain the exclusive preserve of officialdom’. For daring to make this perfectly reasonable comment — and sending one of his ministers to America to investigate the procedures used there — the Home Secretary stands accused of bowing to the tabloid media, risking public hysteria and playing with populist fire. Before joining this chorus, it is worth reviewing the sequence of events that have led Mr Reid to this point.

In the past fortnight there has been a furore over the case of Craig Sweeney, the convicted paedophile who sexually assaulted a three-year-old girl but will be eligible for parole after only five years and 108 days. Mr Reid has also ordered that paedophiles be moved out of hostels close to schools, after the shocking disclosure that 60 child abusers were living in such facilities. As David Davis, the shadow home secretary, remarked, this matter really is a ‘no-brainer’.

Much has been made, rightly, of Sweeney’s sentence, and the extent to which the judge himself or the legislation he followed was to blame. No less important, however, is the fact that Sweeney had so easily slipped the net of those who were meant to be monitoring him. Following his earlier conviction for the sexual assault of a six-year-old girl, Sweeney was in prison from April 2003 to July 2004. He was then supervised by the Multi-Agency Public Protection Arrangements (Mappa) in Gwent until December last year. Days later, he reoffended.

The Mappa procedure was put on a statutory footing by the Criminal Justice and Court Services Act (2000) as a means of co-ordinating information about violent and sex offenders between police, the prison service and probation officers.