The government has a plan to sort out prison crowding. It appears representatives of Britain’s justice system are unimpressed.
I was particularly chuffed with
o Parliament has been extremely poor in not predicting the impact of its own legislation or acting on any predictions of prison population it has made, and improvement is highly desirable.
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“representatives of Britain’s justice system”
Or, to be more precise, an anonymous blog by someone claiming to be “an English magistrate”.
I was reading a newspaper the other day. The front page story was where the magistrates had convicted someone but were complaining about that lack of prison places for young offenders and had to give them a non-custodial sentence.
Unsurprising? Probably – but it was the newspaper with the reports of my mothers wedding in it! (for reference I’m 38 and was born in wedlock 🙂
Anon – although Bystander claims to be an English magistrate – and almost certainly is, given his grip on the detail, the representatives of Britain’s justice system I was referring to were the circuit judges and the Magistrates Association that were quoted at length.
OK. It’s a fair cop, guv.
They should liberalise the drug laws & address the causes of crime, then they might get less crime, & thereby have less people in prison.
But this government are happy having one of the highest incarceration rates on earth, because their pathetic fear of the Daily Mail and the Sun (which are actually paper tigers, & would crumble under a sustained assault from anyone who dared) keeps them from enacting any remotely progressive policy.
There are so many problems such as the rate of illiteracy in prisons, which are ignored by the punitive knuckledraggers, whose ideas will only make crime worse… as rates of crime soared under Thatcher & will under BoJo, for example.
Labour & the Tories can’t help themselves.
I agree with Asquith that we should liberalise the drug laws. That would certainly reduce crime levels.
Beyond that, I would have thought the reintroduction of corporal punishment would help too – sending criminals to “universities of crime” is probably not the cleverest way to punish someone. “Community service” is widely seen as a joke, both by criminals and the law-abiding. We desperately need some alternative to prison, but one that represents a genuine punishment and is therefore a deterrent.
I’m convinced it would be possible to have more education-leaning detention centres – smaller ones so that misguided kids are not thrown into the same arena as older, professional criminals.
First point to accept is that, contrary to Mr Howard’s line, prison does not work. Our current levels of incarceration and offence-repetition are embarrassing.
Julian H
Offence repetition is a false measure for assessing if prison works. It’s an example of the fallacy of population bias. Prison is designed to deter people from committing crime. Counting repeat offenders considers only those for whom it was an insufficient deterrent.
Our high levels of incarceration are due to our high levels of crime.
And what are our high levels of crime due to, then? 😉
Prison is hardly a punishment – either for the majority of offenders for whom it represents an improvement of their housing conditions and a less chaotic form of existence, or those who use it as a means to improve their lot (by networking with more experienced offenders to learn additional skills or by using the time in the institution to enable them to create some structure in their lives).
My radical plan would be to stop with all the ‘punishment’ rhetoric and find productive ways to compensate victims and prevent reoffending.
Instead of recording information about the people who commit crimes they should be tested to ascertain and measure the causes of their behaviour – dangerous drivers are forced to undertake retraining, drug addicts can be forced to undergo detox etc.
Incarceration alone doesn’t rehabilitate and community service has no teeth to make it more than a chore.
One slightly off-beat and radical way to answer this would be to add to the requirement to register at police stations the requirement to do certain amount of penance at their place of worship under the supervision of religious authority – for the irreligious and atheists among convicts that would be a real punishment!