Crime

Friday

David Blackburn

If the Tories go on like this Labour will become the party of law and order

Before such fripperies were banned, al-Qaeda terrorists were given lessons in stand-up comedy while in high-security prisons. I’d have thought that the exploding underpants fraternity had natural advantages in comedy, but never mind. What I want to know is who gave the lessons? It’d be ironic if it was a voluntary group. The Mail has worked itself into a panicked fury about that the ban on prison parties would be revoked. To be fair to the Mail, Crispin Blunt, the Prisons Minister claimed as much in speech last night, and he vowed to abolish Indeterminate Sentences for Public Protection – orders that incarcerate the sort of charmers who butcher you

Thursday

David Selbourne

Too late to save Britain – it’s time to emigrate

David Selbourne is a political philosopher and theorist. This article appeared in the magazine last week; it is an edited version of his speech for a Spectator debate on the motion, ‘Too late to save Britain. It’s time to leave.’‘ Part of me feels that those who have helped to bring the country down — venal politicians, false educators, degraders of the media, thieving privatisers of the public domain — need to be fought to a standstill, here on this battlefield, by those with the energy, strength and clarity of mind to do so. For no one wants to believe that the country of his birth, language, upbringing and way

Wednesday

David Blackburn

Howard versus Clarke

Michael Howard appeared on today’s Daily Politics and laid into Ken Clarke’s ‘caricature’ of a policy to reduce prison places. There is, Howard argues and John Denham supported him, a correlation between increasing the number of those incarcerated and a fall in crime. In other words, prison still works. Howard criticised Clarke’s ‘rather foolish’ denial of that link. Howard echoes the Spectator’s editorial line that early release endangers society, and that it costs less in real terms to keep criminals in prison. Howard’s off-message critique is the most total I have yet seen, particularly on the statistical case against the government’s position. It is significant that it came from a

Saturday

Andrew Taylor

Recent crime novels | 17 July 2010

Michael Ridpath, best known for his excellent financial thrillers, explores new territory in Where the Shadows Lie, which combines elements of the American cop crime novel with J. R. R. Tolkein and post-credit-crunch Iceland. Magnus, a detective with the Boston Police Department, is a key prosecution witness in a case that may bring down a Dominican drug gang. For his own safety, he’s temporarily transferred to Iceland to advise their police department on modern criminal methods. He’s promptly provided with work experience — the killing of a philandering academic. Why did a suspicious Yorkshire truck driver with a fetish for Tolkein have an appointment with the dead man? How does

Wednesday

David Blackburn

Perverse though it sounds, prisons can be a haven for opportunity

So much of the welfare debate is lost in jargon and the numbingly large and depressing numbers. John Bird, founder of The Big Issue, has just been on The Daily Politics and he condensed the specious waffle into plain but evocative sound bites. ‘You don’t have a broken society without a broken system. The usual suspects come in and advise Blair, Brown and now Cameron that what you need is money for the poor. The poor don’t need more money; the poor need more opportunity.’ Bird admitted that prison made him upwardly mobile. He left it being able to read, write and paint, and was given the confidence to pursue

David Blackburn

Prison works, but not as well as it might

Ken Clarke has laid another argument against prison. There is no link, he alleges, between falling crime rates and spiralling prisoner numbers. Well, perhaps not, but it’s quite a coincidence. Clarke has been tasked with the impossible: assuring an easily frightened public that releasing prisoners will not lead to more muggings, robberies and intimidation. There are arguments on both sides. A recent Spectator editorial took the Michael Howard line that prison works and crime costs. The opposition does not contest either of those propositions, just if prison alone is the best way to reduce crime. The outgoing Chief Inspector of Prisons, Dame Anne Owers, argues in the Guardian for investment

Saturday

David Blackburn

Insane culture

I’ve just flicked on the television in search of fresh disasters. The news that Raoul Moat shot himself when cornered in a kessel is still ‘breaking’. In this heat I’d be surprised if he wasn’t oozing by now, but 24 hour news doesn’t concern itself with such trivialities. The ‘Yours Concerned’ BBC reporter intoned in horror that 2 tasers had been used in the operation.  Now, I wouldn’t arm the officious clown who asked why I was carrying a bottle of Crozes Hermitage through Waterloo station yesterday evening. I oppose the adoption of tasers in anything other than extreme circumstances. But Mr Moat was fairly extreme in my book, given,

Thursday

David Blackburn

Gary McKinnon should convert to radical Islam

The European Court of Human Rights is an essential check on executive excess, but today it has perverted justice. It has halted Abu Hamza’s extradition to the US, where he was to be tried for colluding with al Qaeda. Its view was that Hamza would likely be subject to inhumane and degrading incarceration. In other words, the ECHR has decided that the US prison system is not compatible with the standards agreed by signatories to the European Convention on Human Rights. Fine. Except, of course, it has not. There is a pernicious double standard at work here. Gary McKinnon, the aspergers sufferer who hacked into the Pentagon’s computer systems, is

Wednesday

John R. MacArthur

King and his killer

In the late days of the Bush administration, it was fashionable among liberals to call George W. Bush the ‘worst’ president since the founding of the republic and to suggest that under his leadership America experienced its own version of the Dark Ages. In the late days of the Bush administration, it was fashionable among liberals to call George W. Bush the ‘worst’ president since the founding of the republic and to suggest that under his leadership America experienced its own version of the Dark Ages. Even allowing for Bush’s considerable ignorance and malevolent world view, those contemporary doomsayers had forgotten recent history. As bad as the Bush era was,

Friday

Alex Massie

The Prisoner’s False Dilemma

Does prison work? I’m very pleased that John McTernan – who is one of the brightest and sanest of Labour buttons – is now ensconsed at the Daily Telegraph. Unfortunately he’s not inoculated against daftness: Suddenly it’s become fashionable to see ending short term sentences as common sense. Alex Massie is the latest victim of this strange policy meme. He praises “the presumption that prison sentences of fewer than three months are generally to be avoided on the reasonable grounds that they don’t do much good for or to anyone”. This is quite an odd argument. You need to be a fairly bad person to get a prison sentence –

Wednesday

Max Chambers

Law and order

Along with defence, there’s one other area where rolling back the state doesn’t come naturally to Conservatives: criminal justice. The massive cuts looming on the horizon for the criminal justice system would have been politically toxic for any party to deliver, but for the traditional party of law and order there will be a special discomfort.   Ken Clarke’s speech this morning was much less exciting for the penal reform/abolitionist lobby than the morning papers indicated. Echoing Nick Herbert’s speech to Policy Exchange last week, the Justice Secretary rightly said that that the test of a successful criminal justice system was not simply the number of people you lock up

Isobel Greenhalgh

Reds under the bed

This Russian spy story just gets better and better. First a young, attractive Russian woman called Anna – with a penchant for uploading suggestive pictures of herself onto Facebook — is seized in an FBI swoop for being at the centre of a Russian espionage network. Next, it emerges that the agents from Moscow had outwitted the FBI by going back in time. Aware that electronic messages — via mobile, or online — are are an open book to any decent spook-catcher, they simply learnt from the past and used invisible ink and messages in buried bottles to send information their colleagues in South America. Some of the spies even

Alex Massie Alex Massie

A Shocking, Startling Outbreak of Good Sense

Meanwhile, good sense vis a vis the criminal justice system is going viral at an alarming rate. At the Scottish Parliament MSPs voted  – 63-61 – to reject a (typically illiberal) Labour amendment (backed by the Tories too) that would have imposed mandatory six month prison terms for anyone found carrying a knife in a public place. And now they’ve only gone and endorsed a proposal that creates the presumption that prison sentences of fewer than three months are generally to be avoided on the reasonable grounds that they don’t do much good for or to anyone. It’s probably necessary, alas, to point out that opposing mandatory minimum sentences for

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Ken Clarke Is Right

Actually, Ken Clarke is one of the Good Tories. Indeed, one could spend some time speculating on how the Conservative party might have fared had it chosen him to lead it and not, say, Iain Duncan Smith. (Yes, there’s europe but…) Obviously then, this means some people think he personifies everything that is wrong with the Conservative party and never mind that he was a better Chancellor than anyone who’s held that job since. And so Clarke is right to argue that we should probably send fewer people to prison and thus I disagree – respectfully! – with the Spectator’s editorial on the subject. This doesn’t mean – as the

Peter Hoskin

The case against cutting prison numbers

With all the hoo-haa about Ken Clarke’s plan to reduce prison numbers, it’s worth disinterring the Spectator’s leader column on the subject from a couple of weeks ago.  Here it is, for the benefit of CoffeeHousers: One of the many ludicrous Liberal Democrat policies which Tories enjoyed rubbishing during the general election was their plan to send far fewer criminals to prison. But, alas, it seems that some bad ideas are infectious. Last week Ken Clarke, the new Justice Secretary, suggested that we can no longer afford to keep so many prisoners — so we should sentence fewer, and for shorter periods. Why, he asked, is the prison population twice

Tuesday

Dale Bassett

The case for elected police commissioners

This afternoon I had the privilege to speak in a panel discussion at the National Policing Conference in Manchester, held jointly by ACPO (Association of Chief Police Officers) and the APA (Association of Police Authorities).  The subject was the future of policing – a particularly important one given the potential 25 per cent cut in budgets the service is expecting.   To the credit of the Police, they’re already pioneering examples of the kind of changes that can save a lot of money while seeing services improve. Surrey, for example, has greatly increased the proportion of civilian staff in its force, acknowledging that they can do many jobs better and

Peter Hoskin

Hugh Orde’s rhetoric is encouraging for Osborne

Whatever happened to Sir Hugh Orde?  A few months ago, he was threatening to resign over the Tories’ plans for elected police commissioners.  But later, in a speech to the Association of Chief Police Officers, he seems to have come over considerably more cooperative.  On spending cuts, he stresses that police numbers will likely be reduced, but adds that “we fully understand that all will have to share the pain.”  And on elected police commissioners, the worst he can bring himself to say is that “the test is reconciling it with operational independence for policing … we have an absolute right to clarity on how this system will work.”  There

Saturday

Gilbert Adair

In and out of every dive

Robert Coover’s Noir is a graphic novel. Robert Coover’s Noir is a graphic novel. Not literally, in the contemporary sense in which the phrase is used to designate a highfalutin words-plus-pictures album; but figuratively, in that its language cannot help but be converted, in the reader’s inner eye, into a series of monochromatic images, images suggestive less of a film than of, precisely, the layout of some neo-noir comic-strip. Frank Miller’s Sin City, for instance. Like Miller, Coover pulverises the film noir aesthetic to a hallucinatory essence. In a conceit subsequent pasticheurs will find it hard to improve on, he actually has the nerve to name his private eye Philip

Saturday

Diana Hendry

The loss of innocents

Here are two novels about that most harrowing and haunting of subjects — children who go missing. Here are two novels about that most harrowing and haunting of subjects — children who go missing. Rachel Billington’s Missing Boy is Dan, a 13-year- old runaway. Dan’s disappearance marks the beginning of a nightmare for his parents, Eve and Max, plus aunt Martha. Has Dan run away or has he been kidnapped? Will he be found? The if, where and how are the questions that torment them. As Ronnie, the police liaison officer puts it, though families vary, when there’s a missing child the suffering is always the same, a pattern of

Cressida Connolly

Out for blood

Unless you have spent the last couple of years packed in soil on a boat bound for Whitby, you will have noticed that vampires are back in fashion. It’s an international craze, with Japanese and Swedish films (notably the marvellously quirky Let the Right One In, now being remade in Hollywood) contributing fresh interpretations. The queen of the vampire scene was, until lately, the darkly baroque Anne Rice, author of Interview With a Vampire. Now her crown has gone to Stephenie Meyer, whose Twilight series, about teen vampires, have sold more than 100 million copies throughout the globe, as well as being made into hugely popular films. In a neat