‘Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime’ is one of the great political soundbites. Sadly, though, Tony Blair’s government never managed to put both parts of into action. Any long term solution to the current spate of violence is going to require us to do both simultaneously.
I’d urge all Coffee Housers to read Minette Marrin in The Sunday Times, who deals with the later part, and Alasdair Palmer in The Sunday Telegraph, who addresses the former.
Minette Marrin makes the essential point that the social contract breaks down when people feel that they have no stake in society:
As Danny Kruger argued recently, it is phenomenally hard for those who never been loved to love their neighbour. These violent youths are in a way simply applying the golden rule: do as you would be done by. But tragically what has been done to them is, generally, cruel and brutal and so they act that way towards others.“Morality depends on having something to lose. It isn’t just a matter of learning right from wrong, least of all in a post-religious society. Morality is socially constructed. I will respect your property and your person because I want you to respect mine. We both have something to lose. One does not have to be educated in political philosophy to understand that ancient deal. But if I have neither property nor respect from anyone, what’s in the deal for me?”
Once people cross the line into criminality, though, society needs to be protected from them as well as attempting to rehabilitate them. Alasdair Palmer points out that the government for reasons of financial expediency is going to be making the case for more community-based sentences despite their ineffectiveness.
“Less than half of all those given a community sentence actually comply with its conditions. Community sentences are no better at reforming criminals than prison is: the truth is they’re both equally useless.
But 11 per cent of those given community punishments are convicted of fresh offences while they are actually serving their community sentence. And the number who commit further offences without being convicted or even apprehended is much, much higher than that, and may be as high as 80 per cent.
In so far as anything works to reform youngsters, it consists in persuading them that crime does not pay. But that is not a lesson our criminal justice system teaches, particularly when only one crime in every hundred results in the perpetrator going to prison.”
In the short term, government needs to provide more prison places. But in the long term, the strategy must be to reduce the need for them. That is going to require transforming ‘tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime’ from a neat soundbite into an actual policy agenda.
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