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Socialist Review Index (1993–1996) | Socialist Review 181 Contents

Harry Fletcher

The guilty party

From Socialist Review, No. 181, December 1994.
Copyright © Socialist Review.
Copied with thanks from the Socialist Review Archive.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.

Why has a crisis erupted in the criminal justice system?

The most essential point is that in 1993 Kenneth Clarke reversed a consensus that you use prison as a last resort and try to supervise as many people as possible, particularly young people, in the community. Allied to that was the abandonment of a policy developed since the late 1970s where police cautioned young people who had committed offences.

So the prison population has gone through the 50,000 mark, up 20 percent in less than 12 months.

The obsession with custody is reflected in the Criminal Justice Act. It proposes locking up teenagers when all the evidence shows this merely confirms them as criminals. It makes bail hard to get, when the rate of offending on bail has not changed in ten years.

It criminalises forms of behaviour the Tories don’t like – squatting, raving, travelling and so on – and could add hundreds to the daily prison population. It proposes more prisons and gives Howard the power to designate any structure, stable or floating, as a prison. That is code for a reintroduction of prison hulks.
 

What sort of people are in prison?

The total number who go in and out of prison in a year is about 105,000. The biggest group of these are fine defaulters – about 24,000 a year. Four years ago these numbered about 15,000. There has been a doubling in the number going down for not having a TV licence, and all the people who refused to pay their poll tax are now being processed.

There is a disproportionate number of women within this group. Only 3 percent of people in prison are women. But among those not paying their poll tax or TV licence it rises to 30 percent, and I suspect they are predominantly single parents who are easy game for enforcement officers.

There has also been a huge rise in the number of remand prisoners, up about 20 percent in 12 months to around 11,000–12,000. These are people, remember, who have not been tried.

The Home Office’s own statistics show only 41 percent of men and 26 percent of women remanded in jail actually get a prison sentence when they come to trial. So there is something deeply wrong with the remand system. But rather than attend to that the Tories will ensure even more people are remanded in custody.

Only about a third of the prison population are there for violence – murder, arson, rape, robbery. The rest are in for offences that have not involved violence of any kind. We know prisons confirm rather than deter criminal behaviour.

If you profiled the prison population at the moment, around half would be abusers of drugs or alcohol and 30 percent have mental health problems of one kind or another. Around one in three will have been in local authority care, and at least half will have had serious problems at school and therefore literacy problems.

The profile is not one of sophisticated robbers or professional thieves. The vast majority are people who come from very poor backgrounds.
 

Michael Howard claims ‘prison works: Does it stop people re-offending?

The younger people are, the more the chance of re-offending. Among 14–15-year-olds it’s about 85 percent. It drops to around 75 percent for people in their late teens and around 60 percent for adults. Some 95 percent of the prison population come out to unemployment and 60 percent to no home. That means they are going to spend the first three or four weeks trying to get benefits. Almost by the end of the first week their re-offending behaviour has been confirmed because they have no benefit.

The Home Office’s own statistics show that to achieve a 1 percent fall in the crime rate you would have to increase the prison population by 25 percent.

The Tories tried to claim the recent 5 percent drop in crime figures was down to their policies. An alternative theory was that there had been a slight fall in unemployment. But two chief constables revealed in October that the police have been cooking the books and over 300,000 crimes that would have been recorded in 1993 were not recorded in 1994.
 

What effect are Tory prison policies having on inmates?

As more and more people are crammed in, there is a marked deterioration in the amount of activities for prisoners. Latest figures show an increase of about 20 percent in assaults on staff, and 15 percent on other prisoners, in 12 months.

At the same time, all the criminal justice agencies have got to be 10 percent more efficient and prisons have to be more ‘austere’ – allowing prisoners less home leave and making them earn ‘privileges’ that used to be automatic unless they misbehaved. It’s a recipe for disaster. Anyone who has worked in a prison will tell you the regime is a careful balance between security and control and the privileges prisoners are allowed.

For years everybody has known prison officers pretend not to notice cannabis in jails, for example. I did a survey in 1993 and found cannabis available in 90 percent of prisons. Howard wants an increase in searches and compulsory testing. If prisoners refuse they are on a charge. It will heighten the tension and lead to confrontation. Also, the more people there are in prison, the more delay there is in processing them.

The problems are most intense in Doncaster private jail. I have a file full of complaints since July of probation officers and solicitors saying they have visited the prison to interview people and have not been able to because staff can’t find prisoners. Problems like that are going to get worse. It will affect the level of justice.
 

What do you think of Howard’s latest announcements, of ‘neighbourhood patrols’ and identity cards?

A statistic the police have used themselves is that a constable would have to walk around London for four to five years before they actually caught someone in the act of committing a crime. It makes complete nonsense of Howard’s idea of neighbourhood patrols ‘walking with a purpose’. It would be five years on average before anyone found anything.

National ID cards will be about as popular as Howard. He will have been told a compulsory scheme is unworkable. So he has come up with this silly idea of a voluntary card. Well, criminals won’t volunteer to have one. It won’t stop those 500,000 regular offenders committing offences. What will stop them is if they could get a decent job.
 

How will the threatened changes to the probation system affect people?

The probation service looks after about 140,000 people – a mix of people on probation, on community service and on parole. Only half those on community service are there as an alternative to prison. For the rest it’s an alternative to fines or a discharge.

Of people on probation, 80 percent complete their order without re-offending. For community service, it’s about 75 percent. Once the order is finished, the number re-convicted within two years is about 50 percent. The rate among prisoners is about 60 percent. So there isn’t much difference. But the type of offending is not as serious as among ex-prisoners. Also, probation is a hell of a lot cheaper and the Home Office admits people come out better because they haven’t been incarcerated.

Now the Tories want to change the nature of community penalties to make them more severe, more tough, more militaristic. They know it won’t happen with the current probation staff, who are basically trained at colleges on social work courses. So what we’ll see over the next couple of years is an attempt to scrap the training and get the SAS people in.

It will be disastrous. It will lead to massive confrontation between youn g offenders and these army people.
 

Labour has joined the Tories to claiming to be the party of law and order. Why do you think crime bas such a resonance?

Howard and Major recognise that law and order is one of the few areas left where they can play to the gallery. During 1993–94 Howard undoubtedly got a pounding from Tony Blair and he has been vilified by the right wing press. But I believe the Tories will still play the law and order card in the next 18 months and become more extreme.

An indication of the degree to which they will go is the idea junior minister David Maclean is floating, of sending teenage offenders on 40-mile SAS yomps. The guy is off the wall. We know sending raw recruits from working class backgrounds on yomps kills some of them.

There is no doubt at all there is a very, very genuine fear of crime. But the Tories have caused crime through the policies they have pursued over the last 15 years.

Where Tony Blair is open to intense criticism is that he has failed to make this connection. I had numerous meetings with him when he was shadow home secretary and said the most important thing for him to do was to make the links between Tory health policy, education policy, economic policy and crime on the streets. The rise in crime didn’t just happen out of nothing.

If you look at just one example, school exclusions, the number of 14-, 15- and 16-year-olds excluded from schools in the last two to three years has doubled. How come? The reason is schools are having to compete with one another. If you exclude kids who aren’t going to do well in exams, you minimise the risk of being low in the league table.

It’s happening across the board. But I don’t think Blair has made that point sufficiently. My view is he’s wrong. I think if you explain where crime comes from that would have a resonance too.
 

Labour repeats some of the wilder claims about crime – the jokes about lobster takeaways in jail, for instance. Are they true?

It is depressing to see Blair and others referring to luxuries in prison, to ‘teenage tearaways’ on safari and to ‘bail banditry’. All of them are myths and Labour leaders know it. As far as we know, the total number of prisoners who have had takeaways is six out of 50,000 and they were all in a special unit at Whitemoor.

The total number of ‘young tearaways’ supervised last year was 105,000 and we’ve found seven who went on holidays. All of those were in council care – the local authority was acting as their parents, and why shouldn’t they have a holiday?

Bail banditry is also a myth. The Home Office’s own study shows offending on bail was unchanged in the years 1979–93. I’m afraid the Labour Party conference was carried away with the media hysteria about one or two cases.
 

When Blair talks of being tough on crime, what does he mean?

He means the police would have the resources to investigate, target and arrest, to catch the maximum number of people. The courts would give punishments commensurate with the seriousness of what they had done.

Blair would certainly see the continuation of a sizeable prison population. He would also want community penalties tougher than at the moment. So I don’t think it would be that much different from Howard, although I do think he would reverse the policy of banging people up regardless of resources and of what happens to them.

In terms of being tough on the causes of crime, he has been much more oblique. I haven’t seen a statement from Labour which says quite clearly that the causes of crime are poverty and unemployment. For the vast majority of people the probation service deals with, there is a clear causal link between their offending and poverty and unemployment.

I’m confident an incoming Labour government would stop privatisation of the criminal justice system and look again at the role of local authorities in crime prevention, though it is difficult to see how they could do much about it. In terms of the level of unemployment, housing problems and what have you, I think we’ll get lots of meaningful statements but would not expect much of an impact.
 

How do you feel about Labour’s failure to oppose the Criminal Justice Bill?

I’m deeply disappointed Labour chose to abstain on the third reading back in July. I believe it was a political mistake. It was the result of ultra-cautiousness, of not wanting to be seen as soft on crime.

A whole range of organisations had pointed out the bill was deeply flawed. But 12 months ago Labour decided to move to the right of centre on law and order. By the time they realised this rag-bag of a bill was alienating everyone from probation officers to ramblers, there was no turning back.

They have made fools of themselves since. I heard Labour MP Alan Michael on the radio saying Labour would repeal bits of the Act. Tory minister David Maclean just scoffed and said, ‘That’s nonsense, these people abstained on it.’ They have moved so much onto Tory ground, they have become the Tories’ prisoners really.
 

What alternatives are there to locking people up?

The first thing is to keep people out of the formal system. One Tory success of the last 15 years is the increase in police cautioning of young offenders.

In 1979 about 100,000 people were cautioned. Last year it was 340,000. Of all those cautioned only 3 percent go on to commit serious crimes and 88 percent never come to the notice of the police again.

What did Howard do last year? He decided too many people were being cautioned and scrapped second and third cautions. Already this year we’ve seen 30,000–40,000 people processed who previously would have been cautioned.

The prognosis for people caught in the cycle of non-violent offending is hopeless, quite honestly. You’re looking at a significant proportion of people who go to prison – people who are continually getting 6–12-month sentences.

Prison is not the place for these people. But to break the cycle you need proper retraining and skilling, investment in the public sector and the country’s infra-structure, and the removal of obstacles to getting people back in work.

Of course, there are some people whose offences are so serious the public needs protection – and some form of institution is the right place for them. If violence is used, I think prison is appropriate. But if it isn’t, people are basically looking for reparation by the offender. The British Crime Survey showed the vast majority of people who have been burgled want their stuff back – that’s it.

So we should be developing ways in which the offender pays back what they took, and if that’s not possible there should be relevant, visible forms of community service.
 

What would you say to the idea the real criminals in society are those at the top, who get away with it?

I wouldn’t use the term ‘real criminals’. I’d say there are a group of privileged criminals who either get away with it completely or get off lightly – like the defendants in the Guinness Trial who were transferred to Ford open prison within 24 hours of sentencing.

 
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