Can we do more than catch a killer?
One of the things that I’ve found most difficult about the discussion following the horrific murder of Rhys Jones has been the seeming dismissal by much of the media and many commentators of the possibility of change. The wilful misunderstanding of those who ridicule the home secretary for proposing more acceptable behaviour contracts for young people on the brink of crossing over into serious criminality is infuriating: no-one is suggesting replacing prison sentences for gun crime with agreements not to misbehave, but there surely is a place for trying to nip bad behaviour in the bud long long before it gets to the stage of an 11 year-old being shot, presumably by another young person. I don’t believe that anyone is born a criminal (one of the reasons why I’m on the left); I think that society makes it possible, and thus can prevent it. That’s no comfort to a grieving family in Liverpool; and there’s nothing we can do now to change the course of the killer, who is rightly heading for decades in gaol. But can we do anything to make sure that this doesn’t happen again? The kids who these days are tagging walls or skipping school, can we make sure one of them doesn’t end up killing someone someday? I think we can - and that Jacqui Smith is right to think about that too, as well as catching and punishing the killer of Rhys Evans.
Born free?…
…
The answer is simple: more prisons = more criminals behind bars = less crime.
Pull out the EU, bring back the death penalty and give real sentences. But you Labour and your Limp Dem friends always feel sorry for the crininal scum not the victims.
Yes, these stories are horrific and I don’t envy the task of people like Antonia who have to try and formulate some kind of political response to it all.
Antonia’s instincts are the right ones but I think she is as perplexed by the problem as everyone else. How do we nip youthful malfeasance in the bud before it gets out of hand?
I quibble with her on just the one sentiment, namely that society makes possible criminality. While there are indubitably social factors to be taken into account in youth criminality I think we also have to acknowledge that young offenders have free will.
I’m not sure I believe #2 at all.
The United States has the highest prison population per capita compared to the any other democratic country in Europe or the rest of the world, and it spends the least on welfare, facts which are probably related.
If the UK were solely to build more prisons, this would be admitting defeat. The UK needs to be a society that dissuades people from becoming criminals in the first place, and offers prospects for criminals to reform and better themselves, at the same time as protecting the public.
Approaches to such apparently contradictory aims will take imagination to conceive and objectivity to assess, but they’re worth considering. Any fool can build more prisons.
If the UK were solely to build more prisons, this would be admitting defeat.
This kind of dogmatic claptrap is the problem with the argument. We should care about precisely one thing - reducing crime - rather than about winning or losing some bizarre ideological struggle.
If it is the case that jailing more criminals and/or jailing criminals for longer periods of time is the most effective way of reducing crime, then that’s what we should do (and would involve building more prisons). [Sidenote: our prison capacity over the last several years hasn't kept up with the Home Office's own predictions of the number of prison places that we'll need. We're not building enough prisons now, for our current strategy, let alone enough to get "tougher"].
It strikes me as unlikely that simply building more prisons is going to be the best use of a finite supply of taxpayer’s cash, though.
In the case of young offenders, the challenge must be to nip offending behaviour in the bud. I suspect that one of the problems with the current system is that children who encounter the legal system in response to their low-level criminality get a long string of warnings, cautions, talkings-to and general slaps on the wrist that don’t actually have any effect on their day-to-day lives, and happen weeks or months after the fact. If you catch a child vandalising a wall, say, it should be possible to throw him in the cells overnight and have him in front of the bench the next day. You need to make the association between cause (crime) and effect (punishment) as clear as possible. “Acceptable behaviour contracts” could well be a useful tool for medium-term management of young offenders - or they may be completeky useless. It’s probably worth a try though - anything is better than yet another tired repetition of the “I’m a criminal because I’m bored because you didn’t buy me a skate park” whine.