Hmmm.
The surprise in today’s poll is that 51% no longer reckon prison is the
answer: that should mark a milestone in Labour thinking. After the
thundering years of Blair/Straw/Blunkett/Reid rhetoric of retribution
driving through a firestorm of criminal justice bills, most people now
think alternatives to prison are likely to work better. On Labour’s
watch the prison population doubled to 80,000, even though crime has
fallen steeply, including violent crime.
Still not quite grasping the thought (and I make no claim that this is true, just that it’s something which we might consider) that putting people into jail reduces the crime rate?
While nearly 80% of young prisoners are reconvicted, only 55% of people given community sentences reoffend.
A most odd assertion: not that I doubt it, just that again there’s an explanation that doesn’t seem to occur to Polly. Imagine that we had (!) a well functioning criminal legal system. In the process of sorting through those who have committed crimes we try to decide upon the appropriate sentence for them. One can imagine that there are some sociopaths in the population, those we might simply want to lock up to protect others (there are indeed people serving life sentences where life means life in jail: precisely for this reason). We might also think that at the other end there are those who are not habitual criminals, those who have strayed off the straight and narrow, either on this one occasion only or those for whom the public shame of a conviction, whatever the punishment itself, would be enough to stop reoffending.
There’s no need for us to put any particular criminal into one class or the other at this point, just that we acknowledge that there is a spectrum of criminality and that those at one end get heavier punishments than those at the other. And, in our well functioning criminal legal system (!), there’s a correlation between those who receive the heavier punishments and the liklihood of their reoffending at some point in the future.
Think, for example, of two caught robbing. One asks for 150 cases (a not unknown number) to be taken into further consideration. For the other this is desperately unlucky: first time doing the crime, gets caught. The former would, I think most people would happily agree, be more likely to reoffend: he’s also more likely to get a prison, rather than community, sentence.
So, yes, there is indeed a correlation between prison sentences and the liklihood of reoffending. But what’s the causality? That those who receive prison are those already more likely to reoffend? Or, as Polly implies, that it is prison itself which makes people reoffend?
Here are the don’t-panic facts: gun and knife carrying is increasing
and dangerous, but latest Home Office figures show 50 fatal shootings
in 2006, compared with 66 in 1995. There were 243 fatal stabbings in
1995, but only 212 in 2006.
Again, there’s an alternative explanation here. Medicine does move on you know (and with the amount thrown at it, one would hope so too): again, I don’t insist that this is true, only that it be considered. As Unity points out, incidence of injury is up and deaths are down. So is the NHS simply getting better at dealing with knife and gun trauma?
Leave a Reply