Dominic Lawson: You may not like it, but prison works - and we need to lock up more people, not fewer
Prison may not have a massive deterrent effect - but 'not-prison' has even less power to deter
Friday, 2 February 2007
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"The failure by our courts to hold so many to account must be acknowledged as an outrage... The police and prosecuting authorities must be made to understand by the Government that their underperformance will not be tolerated." Attentive readers of The Independent's comment pages will recognise those words as being from Wednesday's leading article, properly outraged by the fact that less than 6 per cent of rape allegations result in conviction and imprisonment for the claimed perpetrator.
Yet three days earlier, the leader column castigated Mr Blair for "allowing the enlightened 'tough on the causes of crime' approach to be overwhelmed by populist poses adopted to protect his right flank from the authoritarianism of parts of the press. His Government has not considered in any depth the possibilities of a criminal justice system that eschewed the use of prison as its main sanction. Most people know that prison does not "work" except as a university of crime."
Make up your mind, my dear colleagues: do you want a criminal justice system that is uncompromising in the pursuit and punishment of crime, or do you not? For the record of the prosecuting authorities is even worse when it comes to robbery and burglary. The think-tank Civitas has produced figures indicating that there are little more than 5 robbery convictions per 1,000 alleged robbers, and between 7 and 8 convictions per 1,000 alleged burglars.
Obviously rape is a far, far more serious crime than burglary or robbery - it is the theft of something much more valuable than mere objects. On the other hand, older people in particular are often severely traumatised when their homes are violated by an intruder: this is graphically illustrated by the fact that the elderly victims tend to die younger than those of a similar age and background who have suffered no such trauma.
Moreover, there is an evidential problem with rape, which does not apply in cases of burglary. No defence lawyer would dare to tell a court that the householder had invited the burglar in; but since the great majority of rape complaints are made against men closely acquainted with the alleged victim, there will always be room for a skilful barrister to suggest that the sex was consensual.
In the event of a successful prosecution, there are very few who would suggest that the rapist should be spared a substantial prison sentence, even if he pleaded guilty. The majority of rapes are not committed by serial offenders, but even if we could be absolutely certain that a man convicted of raping his wife would not reoffend, we would still expect him to be incarcerated for many years. First, we feel that the misery caused to the victim demands a proportionate punishment. Second, we do not want other men to imagine that they need not fear imprisonment if they were found guilty of similar behaviour - the "deterrent effect".
It is not necessarily "authoritarian" to demand a similar approach in the field of muggings and burglary: it is simply a desire to ensure that criminals fear - and victims respect - the legal system. Mr Michael Howard, the last Tory Home Secretary, attracted much ridicule for claiming that "prison works." When he arrived at the Home Office, he was told by his senior civil servants that crime in this country was on an inexorable upwards path, and that his job was to persuade the public to be reconciled to this "fact". That had been the policy of his immediate predecessors: between 1988 and 1993 the prison population was cut by 10 per cent, and crime reached a historic peak at the end of that period.
Between 1993 and 2001 - New Labour adopted the Michael Howard approach - the average number of people in prison rose by about 45 per cent. It is notoriously difficult to know which crime figures to believe, but the British Crime Survey, which the current government regards as the most reliable, shows that between 1995 and 2001 recorded crimes fell from more than 19 million to 12.6 million.
Even if you are of the view that prison has no deterrent effect, you still can not dismiss this correlation as a coincidence. The Home Office report, Making Punishments Work, estimates that the average offender carries out 140 offences a year: the figure for those with an admitted drug problem is 257 offences per year. You do the math: it's clear that a large slice of the dramatic drop in crime - and commensurate reduction in the misery of victims - recorded in the British Crime Survey was down to the "incapacitation" effect of prison.
It is true that one effect of the gross overcrowding in our prisons is that the work done to wean drug-dependent prisoners off their addiction has been far below what is desirable. The standard prison treatment of giving heroin addicts the substitute of methadone is positively guaranteed not to succeed. The result of this is that, once released, the same person is likely to reoffend. Please note, however: while 53 per cent of those jailed for robbery go on to reoffend, almost 69 per cent of those serving a non-custodial sentence reoffend. Prison may not have a massive deterrent effect, but "not-prison" has even less power to deter, leaving aside the argument of incapacitation which has so impressed Mr Howard and his successors.
I can understand why many commentators are distressed that we imprison a greater proportion of the population than any other European country save Luxembourg; it does not speak well of us as a nation. The less-quoted statistic, however, is the prison population as a proportion of crimes committed. That paints a more pertinent picture. In England and Wales 12 people are imprisoned for every 1,000 crimes committed. In Spain the figure is 48 per 1,000; in Ireland it is 33 per 1,000. Both those countries have much lower crime rates than ours.
Successive New Labour home secretaries have complained, sotto voce, that Gordon Brown regularly stamped on the idea of an ambitious prison-building programme, with the consequences now painfully apparent. If that is true, then the Chancellor should have done a bit more cost-benefit analysis. It would cost about £7bn to double the number of prison places. Yet the annual cost of crime is estimated to be in the region of £60bn. If the incapacitation effect works as it has to date, it is clear that such an expansion of prison capacity would be self-funding.
I realise that newspapers such as this one and The Guardian will continue to argue against such stern measures - and will continue to sneer at the red-top tabloid press for arguing for them. The Sun and the Mirror know their readers, however: the victims of crime are overwhelmingly among the least well-off. The relatively well-to-do have every right to parade their consciences. They are unlikely, however, to encounter the consequences.
