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Eagle Eye
Do I understand Dominic Lawson's reasoning right in his Independent column today? He appears to argue that in Britain we have more prisoners per capita than other European countries because more crimes are committed here. And why is this? Because, according to Lawson, the British prison system doesn't jail enough of its criminals.
So, Lawson suggests, we should imprison still more criminals and then the crime rate would fall and we would, presumably over time, need to jail fewer people. It's an ingenious theory.
The flaw is this is precisely the policy that successive governments have been implementing for the past 15 years. The prison population in 1995 was 49,500. This January it stood at 82,100. As this Ministry of Justice bulletin makes clear, this increase is, in large part, due to "tougher" sentencing - precisely what Lawson seems to want.
The crime rate has fallen (although it is debateable to what extent this is due to increased incarceration rates). Yet the prison population is still heading upwards. It is projected by the Justice Department to be between 83,300 and 93,900 by 2015. So much for the Lawsonian virtuous circle of tougher penalties and smaller prison populations.
I'm with my colleague Amol Rajan. All the evidence available suggests that simply cramming ever more people into our jails is actually counterproductive.
So, Lawson suggests, we should imprison still more criminals and then the crime rate would fall and we would, presumably over time, need to jail fewer people. It's an ingenious theory.
The flaw is this is precisely the policy that successive governments have been implementing for the past 15 years. The prison population in 1995 was 49,500. This January it stood at 82,100. As this Ministry of Justice bulletin makes clear, this increase is, in large part, due to "tougher" sentencing - precisely what Lawson seems to want.
The crime rate has fallen (although it is debateable to what extent this is due to increased incarceration rates). Yet the prison population is still heading upwards. It is projected by the Justice Department to be between 83,300 and 93,900 by 2015. So much for the Lawsonian virtuous circle of tougher penalties and smaller prison populations.
I'm with my colleague Amol Rajan. All the evidence available suggests that simply cramming ever more people into our jails is actually counterproductive.
Comments
What killed her was upper middle class liberalism. Easy to support the powerful thugs when you dont have to deal with the problems yourself - a form of virulent class supremacism.
But the source of crime is often in the early stages of community breakdown. Tackle that.
Instilling fear in a population so as to incarcerate them by persuading them thousands of new offences will make them safer is one of the shabbiest, nastiest, most pointless exercises (apart from bailing banks with taxpayers' money to commit more avaricious atrocities on the economy) a government can do to its electorate. Especially when parliamentary privilege affords them immunity from prosecution themselves...
Who do these elected officials think we are? Of course, if you are in jail, you can't vote...