The rehabilitation game

‘They pretend to pay us and we pretend to work,’ said the Soviet worker in the good old days; the British criminal could nowadays say with equal reason, ‘They pretend to punish us and we pretend to reform.’

Recent statistics show that two thirds of young criminals ordered to wear electronic tags break their court orders almost with impunity. Nothing could better reveal the hall of mirrors that the British criminal justice system long ago became than the response of Keith Vaz, the chairman of the House of Commons all-party Home Affairs Committee, to very similar news last year. ‘The public,’ he said, ‘must be convinced that community sentences are an effective form of punishment.’

In other words, the problem is not how to make community sentences work, but how to create the misleading public impression that they do. This has for decades been the ruling imperative of that great friend to the British criminal, the Home Office (and now the Ministry of Justice). It struggles might and main not to reduce criminality but to reduce the public’s supposedly neurotic fear of crime, and it does so by sowing confusion — confusion with a roseate glow.

Forked-tonguery remains the order of the day among the British political class. Who does not remember Mr Blair’s ‘Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime’? In an interview with the Daily Telegraph this month, the Justice Secretary, Chris Grayling, said that he would like to see longer prison sentences for hardened criminals while also arguing for the use of more electronic tagging, only a matter of five days before he announced the closure of seven prisons as a cost-cutting measure and only a few more days before figures showing the uselessness of electronic tagging were issued from his own department. I’ve known burglars more honest and straightforward than British politicians: who, incidentally, are overwhelmingly the largest single cause of crime in this country.