Diary
The Tories go soft on crime
1 July, 2010
If there was one thing that used to identify the Tory brand, it was a taking hard line on crime and criminals. People might not have liked the Tory party or its leaders but they identified with this message above all others. It resonated with vulnerable communities blighted by crime, so much so that it was subsequently adopted by Labour when they came to power in 1997. One of their former Home Secretaries, Michael Howard, declared that 'prison works' before he went on to rapidly expand the number of inmates in British prisons. Now all this appears to have been shelved in yet another liberal rebranding of the Tory party.
In his big speech yesterday, Ken Clarke declared that there were too many people in prison, largely because there were more inmates serving short sentences. Prisons were becoming ‘warehouses’ for criminals and those on short sentences had little chance for rehabilitation. A new approach was needed which focused on treating criminals outside prison via community punishments.
He described he current prison population of 85,000 as “an astonishing number which I would have dismissed as an impossible and ridiculous prediction if it had been put to me in a forecast in 1992". He then observed that the record prison population and crime rate in England and Wales were among the highest in Western Europe.
Some of these observations are sadly true. In one sense, prison indisputably does not work if its purpose is outright deterrence. After all, a majority of offenders (approximately 65%) go on to re-offend within 2 years. But what the do-gooders always miss is that exactly the same is true of people sentenced to community orders. The difference is that the latter go on to commit more crimes in the community while the former remain behind bars.
In 2001, the Halliday report, Making Punishments Work, estimated that the average offender carried out 140 offences per year, including assaults, robbery, burglary, shoplifting and criminal damage. Locking up even more people will therefore further reduce the number of crimes committed against society.
Clarke’s belief that we should be locking up fewer people on short sentences wrongly assumes that magistrates rarely opt for lighter punishments. In fact, many of those incarcerated for short periods have already been subjected to a variety of ‘community punishments’ which have clearly failed. Under those circumstances, jail is inevitable.
Clarke might be less ‘astonished’ about rising prison numbers were he to acknowledge that crime has been dropping in the last 15 years. In fact, crime as a whole in Britain has fallen by over 40% since the mid 1990s, as judged by the British Crime Survey and other statistical measures. In part, this is a consequence of putting more people in prison, as studies always show a clear correlation between increasing the likelihood of both conviction and incarceration, and falling crime.
The Justice Secretary would no doubt claim that we lock up a disproportionate number of criminals compared to other European countries. As researchers at Civitas have shown, England and Wales (as of 2007) had 147 people in prison for every 100,000 members of the population, as opposed to 122 for the EU as a whole. But this is the wrong measure because what we should really be doing is comparing prison numbers to the actual crime rate, and that gives a very different picture. As Civitas reveals:
If we compare the number of prisoners to the number of recorded crimes, the EU (27) average was 20.7 and the figure for England and Wales was 16.1. In fact, 18 out of 27 EU countries had rates of imprisonment for every 1,000 crimes that were higher. Scotland also had a higher rate, 19.1 per 1,000 crimes.
In other words, we lock up a disproportionately lower percentage of criminals than do a host of other European countries.
Instead of sticking to a Tory agenda on crime, Ken Clarke has adopted a left wing mantra that ‘prison isn’t working.’ This claim is not only misleading but represents a clear betrayal of his party’s core principles. In fact, it represents a betrayal of everything David Cameron was saying on crime only weeks ago in the election campaign.
Mr. Clarke is often described as a maverick with colourful ideas – but that is far too flattering. He is in fact a dangerous maverick.
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