However established it may be, the Tories' reputation as the Party of Law and Order need not be taken seriously. When politicians — or police officers or judges — claim to have a remedy for crime, what they usually have in mind is a more rigorous and punitive response to it. The two are not necessarily connected
The Conservative manifesto at the 1979 election asserted that ". . . respect for the rule of law is the basis of a free and civilised life" and, as If that was an uncontentious statement of fact, plunged into a promise to ". . . spend more on fighting crime even while we economise elsewhere". The proposals in that declaration (rather hesitant by today’s standards) have by and large been implemented, for example there are now some 16,000 more police officers than in 1979 and it is usual for them to get more generous treatment in their pay rises than other government employees. Tougher ("brisker", in Willie Whitelaw's words) regimes have been introduced into Detention Centres and the laws which interfered with the courts’ powers to imprison young offenders have been abolished. But the Tories can hardly be satisfied with the results because since they came to power the incidence of reported crime has not ceased its steady upward path, increasing about six per cent a year. In 1979. just over 2½ million serious offences were recorded by the police: in 1986 there were nearly 4 million.
It seems almost inevitable that more people should be sent to prison, but there are many other choices open to the courts and a succession of Home Secretaries have appealed to them to view a prison sentence as a very last resort But the prison population is still climbing, with over 50.000 people in custody in England and Wales about one in every thousand of the total population. The government expect the figure to reach 56,000 by this time next year and possibly 70,000 by the year 2000. In the European states, Britain is fourth in the league table of the proportion of people sent to prison, with only Austria. Turkey and Luxembourg having a worse record. Such is the overcrowding in prisons that hundreds of unconvicted people pass their time on remand in police cells, often being shunted from one station to another. All of this is a very expensive business; it costs an average of £250 a week to keep a man in prison and a stay in police cells comes even dearer.
A fact which aggravates the anger of Tory hangers and floggers but which also provides them with some unacknowledged comfort is that about half of all known crime is committed by people under the age of 21. The age group above 30 is actually responsible for less crime than it was in 1979; the increase since then is almost entirely contributed by the under 30s. The highest incidence rate for crime is among the 15-year-olds and by the time they reach the age of 21 about a quarter of all males have come to the notice of the police. Home Secretary Douglas Hurd, attempting to discredit the Labour Party argument that crime springs from the dereliction of neglected inner cities or in chronic unemployment, has recently told of episodes of mob violence by young people in the more prosperous rural towns. For the Tories, the comfort in this is that these apparently wild people were born in the 1960s when, as all devotees of Margaret Thatcher are aware, the morals of Britain were in the flaccid grip of permissive hedonists like Roy Jenkins. with their derision for the proper ethical bases of society such as religion, the family, property, the rule of law. the royal family, the small shopkeepers of Grantham . . . One of Tebbit’s favourite themes has always been the moral laxities of the Swinging Sixties. If it can be shown that those iniquitous times gave birth to a generation of hardened criminals, their lives of anti-social disruption mapped out for them when they were still micro-dot embryos, then the Thatcher government is not only absolved of all responsibility for the crime wave but is encouraged to get on with the job of re- imposing lost morals, through the agency of people like William Rees-Mogg.
The cure, one might think, threatens to be rather more deadly than the disease. In any case the argument might have some force were it not for the fact that young criminality did not begin with the 1960s. People who were teenagers then will remember the heyday of the 1950s Teddy Boys, whose elaborate hair style, drape jackets and thick-soled shoes were a delinquent uniform. Then there were the Mods and Rockers, whose idea of Bank Holiday fun was a running fight along some cowering sea front. The figures bear this out. Between 1938 and 1960 the number in every 100,000 of the 14-21 age group who were found guilty of indictable offences more than doubled. Between 1950 and 1960 crimes of violence committed by people aged 14-17 increased by 216 per cent and by those aged 17-21 by 153 per cent. Young crime was surging upwards a long time before the 1960s. according to Howard Jones, writing in 1967, ". . . the present increase in criminality is greatest among young people, whose share of the total seems to increase almost year by year. (Crime In A Changing Society ) Juvenile crime, a lot of it violent and senseless, was at that time also flaring up throughout Europe and North America
The fears and prejudices which young criminals stimulate, often among older workers who want to spend their last years in something like peace after a lifetime of drudgery, are easily exploitable through promises to impose fierce punishment. Control of offenders is now the vogue, rather than the “caring" approach which was enshrined in the Children and Young Persons Act of 1969. This piece of law was supposed to have the hitherto unremarked solution to young people's problems and therefore to their wayward behaviour. In fact the Act has never been fully implemented and now lies partly repealed, a discredited relic which in its day caused magistrates to fume impotently at the restrictions it imposed on then powers to imprison young offenders. Partially in response to this the 1982 Criminal Justice Act introduced the system of Youth Custody which, among other things, allowed magistrates to send youngsters to prison for however long they thought right, up to the maximum in their power. The result was an immediate increase in the numbers of young people in custody 70 per cent more for 14-16-year-olds. In 1987 over 20,000 men aged 17-21 were given a custodial sentence.
But these reforms have been no more successful than those they replaced and young law-breakers continue to be a preoccupation for the police, the courts and the penal system This has confronted the government with a problem which can be briefly outlined like this: crime committed by youngsters goes up year by year; shutting the youngsters away confirms rather than cures their delinquency; custody is not only ineffective but very costly; but the courts and the voters are in no mood to accept a more lenient way of dealing with young offenders; therefore there must be yet more reforms which will satisfy the appetite for control and punishment without involving a prison sentence. This reasoning has been around for some years now and has been responsible for a number of informal attempts to assuage punitive desires while keeping young offenders out of prison. Now the government has produced a Green Paper — Punishment, Custody and the Commentary — which has stirred up a lot of protest as well as approval.
The Green Paper introduces the concept of Punishment in the Community. Its most newsworthy proposal is the electronic tagging of offenders as a method of checking on their whereabouts and, in that way, sometimes imposing a kind of house arrest by remote control. The tags are electronic transmitters which are strapped to the wrist or ankle; this sounds awkward and offensive and that is how they look Some tags emit an unbroken signal which is transmitted by telephone to a central monitoring point, so that the wearer cannot move far from the telephone without this being known. Other tags can be programmed to give out a signal in response to a random telephone call. It is also possible to attach a breathalyser to the telephone so that the monitor calling from the other end would know, not only that the person wearing the tag is where they are supposed to be when they are supposed to be there, but also how much they have had to drink and when Big Brother would not only be watching you but checking up on your breath as well. . .
The Home Office insist that the whole project is still at the investigatory stage, one of a number of ideas they are putting up for discussion. A number of tags have been bought from abroad and are being attached for testing to the limbs of over-compliant civil servants. In America the tags are produced by companies like Bl Home Escort Systems of Colorado, Digital Products Corporation of Fort Lauderdale and Corrective Services Inc of Palm Beach. So far none of the equipment is made in this country but if the idea is implemented companies like Racal Chubb and Marconi, already close'y watching developments, would hope to be cut in on such a nice little earner
The Green Paper puts its proposal;. with an optimism which, though unfounded, is by now familiar. "Punishment in the community", it says, “would be particularly suitable for young men and women, who are likely to grow out of crime”. But there is no cause to believe, that building yet another sentence option into the system would reduce the numbers sent to prison; experience tells us otherwise. There has not been any shortage of choice open to the courts — fines, community service, suspended sentence — but in many cases these have been applied in such a way as to result in more people being sent to prison While the legal draftsmen labour at their sections and sub sections, their clauses and sub clauses, the prisons are crammed more and more, tightly What is overlooked is that the people who draw up the laws and those who pass them have no control over those who implement them. In many cases measures which were designed as an effective alternative to prison have been used as an alternative to those already in existence. In others, legal provisions have been virtually ignored, for example, despite all the publicity about the "short, sharp shock" regimes at detention centres, it turned out that many of the youths sent there actually enjoyed the tough regimes. Now so few are being given that sentence that the places are being converted into low security adult prisons.
Again, the experience of electronic tagging so far should not encourage the Home Office to go ahead with it here. Apart from the many technical snags encountered, basic problem with the tags is that they can be used only with someone who has a stable address and access to a telephone things which many of the people likely to be seen as fit subjects have little chance of having. A recent study by NACRO says that problems with the tags in Canada and the USA have been such that their use is severely limited. Most programmes apply to fewer than 20 people and in February 1987 only 826 tags were n operation throughout the USA, one-third of them on motoring offenders.
Although the Home Office are unlikely to be unaware of these facts, the signs are that tagging offenders will go ahead in this country There will then be yet another degrading and gruesome ritual in the processing of people who have offended against capitalism's laws (the Green Paper states that 95 per cent of crime is against property). There will be another bureaucratic structure with its hierarchy and its forms in triplicate and different colours. Some vengeful appetites will be gratified. There is an alternative to this persistent mess but it will not be found in any Green Paper.
Ivan
