SOCIALIST UNITY

The right to arrest war crime suspects

We are horrified at the proposals by justice secretary Kenneth Clarke to give the director of public prosecutions a veto over arrest warrants in private prosecutions for international crimes (Report, 22 July). The justice secretary’s statement appeared to question the ability of magistrates themselves to weed out flimsy cases. To imply that any previous arrest warrants were issued without judges being satisfied of the existence of serious evidence against the person concerned is an insult to the British legal system and the senior magistrates that preside over such cases. Involving the DPP risks adding a political dimension to a legal decision and introduces a source of delay when urgent action may be required to stop a suspect escaping justice.

Since we call on other countries to uphold human rights and international law, our legal system also has to abide by those principles, in particular bringing to justice those responsible for genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, torture and hostage-taking. It’s no secret that this move is the result of pressure from the Israeli government to try to ensure that ex-ministers and military staff will not have to face warrants for their arrest on entering this country.

Rather than bending to pressure to change the existing law, our government should be issuing a statement of intent that all those responsible for serious international crimes, whatever their nationality, will be brought to justice if and when the evidence supports criminal prosecution. The proposed changes will apply to everyone, making it more difficult to prosecute all suspects, whether from Israel or any other country involved in systematic human rights violations. Britain must not be seen as a safe haven for anyone suspected of committing such grave international crimes. (more…)

By Ken Livingstone from Labour List

One of the great political myths is that the Tories are the party that fights crime.

The facts don’t back this up. Under John Major’s government police numbers in London fell from 28,000 to 26,677. No sooner is a Tory back in charge of policing in London then they start cutting police numbers and threatening the fight against crime.

One of our key tasks when we first established the London mayoralty was to turn around the disastrous decline in police numbers imposed by the previous Tory government. Police numbers rose from 26,000 to 32,000 thanks to increased investment between 2001 to 2009 and safer neighbourhood teams, dedicated to each London ward, have cut crime and reassured Londoners.

Boris Johnson is unpicking that progress: firstly, by reducing the number of police by 455 officers over the course of the next three years; and secondly, as exposed by London Labour Assembly members under questioning about his cuts, by refusing to guarantee the current minimum deployment of our safer neighbourhood beat police teams.

Desperate Tory spin in the last forty eight hours has sought to persuade people that cutting police numbers was a Labour policy. The numbers speak for themselves – up under a Labour mayor, down across Boris Johnson’s four budget years.

Boris Johnson will find it very hard to blame anyone – either Labour or his own government – for a cut he first proposed eighteen months into his administration.

In fact there is a genuine difference of approach on this matter. We adopted the principle – and in my view this should be the policy – that police officer posts freed up should be used for frontline policing.

Labour in London pursued a policy of shifting police from posts that could be covered by civilian staff and putting those police officers into frontline policing. The Tories have radically altered this – cutting police officer posts altogether. So in Boris Johnson’s 2010-2011 budget, agreed earlier this year, 455 police are to be cut from the police service over the next three years. These are not transfers to the frontline – they are cuts altogether.

Boris Johnson’s decision on these cuts prefigured the election of the Cameron-Clegg coalition. They were a foretaste, not a consequence, of this government’s approach. Cameron, Clegg and Osborne may make things a lot worse, but they are following the path trail-blazed by the Tory mayor of London.

And at the 2010/11 budget-setting meeting on policing, Boris Johnson refused to use a council tax windfall of £5.7m to help protect police numbers.

Conservative City Hall’s position on the future of safer neighbourhood police teams has been gestating for some time. The now-deputy mayor Richard Barnes said in 2008 that “Some wards you would term as ’safe’, yet they have full safer neighbourhood teams twiddling their thumbs.” It was quite clear from that time where this thinking would lead. Under questioning during the setting of his budget Boris Johnson said: “I have no intention of imposing a one-size-fits-all model across the whole of London,” adding: “I think that would be a pointless piece of top-downery.”

These police teams have revolutionised policing in London for the better. We need them. Londoners expect their mayor to protect services in the capital and to put a safer London at the heart of their agenda. And it will be harder to protect safer neighbourhood teams if police officer posts are being deleted from the cohort of officer posts available. Once you cut a police post it is much harder to reinstate that post.

That’s why London Labour campaigned flat-out in London against these cuts in the general and local elections. The London Labour Party – from Assembly members to MPs in marginal constituencies – have put the case against this threat to policing.

We need to continue that work through to 2012, campaigning now against the changes for the worse that the Conservatives are driving through, whether Boris Johnson’s police cuts and fare hikes, or government efforts to pass the burden onto people on middle and lower incomes.

It’s why I’m presenting a petition opposing London’s police cuts to the Metropolitan Police Authority today: to say that this course is the wrong one for London, and to show there is a political alternative to the miserable agenda of the Conservative Party that threatens our services and puts our quality of life at risk.

by Eddie Truman
Islamophobia Watch

Mohammed Atif Siddique has had his conviction for terrorism offences overturned by Appeal Court judges.

Dubbed “Scotland’s first home grown Islamic terrorist” Siddique was found guilty in 2007 of possessing suspicious terrorism-related items including CDs and videos of weapons use, guerrilla tactics and bomb-making.

He was also found guilty of collecting terrorist-related information, setting up websites showing how to make and use weapons and explosives, and circulating inflammatory terrorist publication.

Following Siddique’s conviction his lawyer Aamer Anwar was accused of contempt of court but subsequently cleared following a massive campaign to defend him. The day after Siddique’s sentencing to 8 years in jail the media ran riot
with a series of stories that had absolutely no evidence to back them up.

The Scotsman newspaper said that he had been planning a terrorist attack in Canada, while Scottish tabloids
said that he had been on his way to behead the Canadian Prime Minister.

The prosecution of Siddique had also seen serious harassment by the police of the Siddique family

As I wrote at the time:

“This verdict will do more to push young, disaffected Muslims into the arms of extremist groups than any number of Jihadist DVDs on sale on the internet”

And so now we find ourselves with yet another case of UK “Islamic terrorism” that turns out to be nothing of the sort but rather a clear example of the police and prosecution authorities using the draconian powers of the Terrorism Act to harass and persecute Muslims.

Louise over at the Harpy Marx blog can be relied upon to consistently champion the poor and disadvantaged, and although it is unfashionable on the left nowadays she is very dogged in her commitment to those who suffer in the criminal justice system.

Sometimes however I think that her commendable compassion can lead her to overlook the big picture, and by only looking at the issue from the point of view of the offender, she downplays the public policy necessity of combating crime, and the need for providing expression and emotional closure for the victims of crime.

Anyway, it seems that there is a move in the USA for public shaming as an alternative to gaol, and Louise is understandably concerned

The facts of the latest case, as reported in the press,are that a nine year old child mislaid two gift vouchers in Walmart. Two women found them, and although they admitted they contemplated handing them in, they used them instead. They lied to a store clerk and said the cards were theirs, even though they had the child’s name on them, the clerk had asked them because the loss had been reported to the store. They then returned on a second occasion and tried to use them again.

It seems from their comments to the press that the two women – a mother and daughter – believed in the principle of “finders keepers”, and as such may have had a different moral compass for such a situation from the social norm.

Clearly there are many problematic aspects to this form of punishment. Generally, it is located within a punitive American ethos that tilts towards right wing populism, and is less concerned with what works than what plays well to the tabloid press. Paradoxically, the American system is also very poor at providing support for victims of crime, due to its bureaucratic and dispassionate nature. Plea bargaining is very disempowering from the point of view of victim involvement, as it reduces the process of justice to a professional, bureaucratic conveyor belt to deliver people into prison as cheaply and quickly as possible.

The American criminal justice system fails badly by not seeking to reduce crime through social intervention to alleviate underlying social problems and fails to provide help to those at risk of being tempted into crime.

More specifically, such “imaginative” punishments could be rather arbitrary, and are arguably contrary to the spirit of the Common Law prohibition of “cruel and unusual” punishments, and thus also unconstitutional under the Eighth Amendment.

The most effective criminal justice system in the world is Finland’s: although all of the Scandinavian countries have low incarceration rates; lower anxiety levels about crime; and lower crime levels than those countries in Europe with much larger prison populations (particularly Portugal, Spain and the UK). Although there is a public perception of rising crime, in fact every Western European state has recorded falling levels of crime over the last 20 years, and this is not because “prison works”, as the UK with its expanding prison populations has been one of the least effective at cutting crime.

Central to the Finnish experience has been a concerted drive to lower prison population; partly through a flexible strategy including measures like part-time prison sentences (very effective in allowing prisoners to continue working and supporting their families while still losing liberty every weekend); but also through programmes to reduce drug dependency, and to resolve underlying motors towards crime. Reducing prison numbers frees up resources for social measures to combat crime – more social workers, more help in finding employment opportunities, etc.

But the most innovative aspects have been the victim/offender mediation programmes. Despite right wing populism from politicians in the UK praising prison, the reality of our criminal justice system is impersonal and alienating for victims, who often receive no sense of justice. Sara Payne has said as much today in her report which, according to the BBC, argues that justice is currently defined only as “catching the criminal and protecting the public”, and victims and witnesses feel they are included simply to aid that process. Sara Payne recommends that in future delivering justice should be about supporting the victim to overcome the impact of the crime so they can get on with their lives.

The Finnish system seeks to find a resolution acceptable to the victim, which is restorative rather than punitive. Mediation and restitution forces the offender to see the crime from the perspective of the victim; it also provides an emotionally effective outlet for the victim to express anger and grief; only if mediation fails does the case move further through the criminal justice system.

So what should socialists advocate as a criminal justice policy? Firstly we need to recognise that crime matters. Not only does it blight people’s lives, but it is also a moral transgression of our common humanity. In his book ”Crime Control as Industry, Towards Gulags Western Style”  the criminologist Nils Christie quotes the father of American sociology, Charles H Cooley, who argued that this common humanity is rooted in our shared social experience of dependency in childhood. We have all been vulnerable, and we would all have died had we not been cared for and nurtured by others. People look after one another: that is our social nature. Criminality is a socially defined and codified expression of what behaviour we regard as a betrayal of that common bond.

An important driver towards criminality is therefore misperception of what the social norms are. Quite often people self-justify criminal and anti-social behaviour by believing that most other people would approve or behave the same way. There is a specific related problem where sub-cultures of mutual support and motivation build up, most obviously around issues like child sexual abuse or terrorism. Some rare individuals also exhibit sociopath behaviour, where they have an instrumental view of other human beings as being merely tools to be manipulated.

Crime prevention therefore needs to reinforce socially expected norms; and the exemplary value of punishment needs to be recognised as beneficial. Alienation from moral norms also explains why those most susceptible to criminal and anti-social behaviour are relative outsiders – the very rich, the very poor and the young who have not yet developed a stake in stability. Sadly the rich are protected both because they have political influence and much of their anti-social behaviour is not illegal; and where they do actually break the law their wealth often helps them escape justice.

In pre-industrial societies village justice was personal and contextualised by a history of shared experience; they inherited the legal customs, but their deliberations were norm clarifications for each novel situation. This traditional approach could be oppressive, and unfair towards lower status members of the community, but also sometimes surprisingly lenient and reconciliatory. It was also unable to deal effectively with outsiders. Observing a different moral code for within your own community, while having a different set of rules for strangers, is characteristic of some forms of modern criminality with a heritage from the pre-modern period - for example the mafia; and while not necessarily associated with criminality such enclosed moral communities are also encountered among travellers.

As King’s justice replaced the village, ecclesiastic and baronial courts, and as Common Law homogenised and mediated the King’s arbitrary power, the unfairness became an institutional bias in favour of wealth and power; but the rule of law encouraged a national scope to norms of behaviour; and obeying the law became a shared moral expectation even among strangers, not just something you did to avoid trouble.

That moral expectation towards being law-abiding survives, but the legal system has become bureaucratised, and transformed into an “prison-industrial complex”. Justice has become subordinated to homogenisation and judgement and discretion reduced and replaced by management efficiency. Paradoxically, John Major’s call to “understand a little less, and condemn a little more” is corrosive to respect for the law, because understanding why people commit crime is vital if we are to develop policies to reinforce positive social norms, and the depersonalisation of punishment reduces its effectiveness. Condemnation is rarely the primary concern of victims, who have more prosaic worries, and need to understand and come to terms with that has happened to them.

Socialists should certainly favour identifying and helping people likely to commit crime before they do so; we are correct to argue that reducing poverty, and promoting equality will lessen the drivers towards crime. More self-respect, more hope for the future, more sense of security; all these things help people to stay out of trouble. Reducing the prison population would help fund these effective crime prevention measures.

However, some people will still commit crime; and they should be punished. People being punished need to be treated humanely and with respect, and rehabilitated. That is why we oppose the privatisation of the prison service – the profit motive requires running costs to be reduced, but this contradicts the fact that the wider social cost is best reduced by ensuring that prisoners have the best chance of not reoffending - which may mean spending more per prisoner, not less.

The public humiliation of these women has problematic aspects, it certainly falls short of the ideal of treating offenders with respect and dignity: but it is not really an outrage. It is a good idea to explore alternatives to prison; it has received widespread media coverage to reinforce the moral norm that stealing is wrong; and the individual women are unlikely to reoffend. They have avoided prison, and therefore there will be less disruption of their personal support networks. There is also some public catharsis that people who stole from a child have been made to confront what they did.

 It is not a policy that socialists should advocate, but in the context of the American penal system with its presumption towards depersonalised incarceration, it is at least an attempt to think creatively about what punishment is effective in preventing crime. While the right wing have a knee-jerk support for prison, it would be a mistake for the left to have a knee-jerk reaction that gives the impression we don’t think offenders should be punished at all.

Tariq Ur Rehman, one of the North West 10 returned to Pakistan yesterday, the 11th of June. He was forced to do so by his family circumstances – he is a widower with three young children - to accept what is in effect a voluntary deportation. This is not a victory for him or his legal representatives. Tariq had to choose between 18 months in a Category A prison or going back to Pakistan giving up his postgraduate studies and hopes for the future and losing the savings he had invested in his education.

As he has said in an interview on the plane, he had not been involved with or associated with any activity which was in any way suspicious. He said, he knew 3 or 4 of the others arrested with him and they also had ‘normal lives’not involved in or associated with extremism. ‘I have been arrested just because I am a Muslim and I belong to Pakistan. They have destroyed my life, my future. I came to UK for a better future’.

He also said he was returning as a protest over the fact that he was held as a Category A prisoner in Belmarsh, where he was very disturbed by the humiliating strip searches and searches of cells with dogs.

There is no guarantee that he will not be tortured or treated as a terrorist in Pakistan. Home Secretary Jacqui Smith has already said that he is likely to be ‘debriefed’, or interrogated.

The other 9 students arrested in the case are still in Category A prisons, challenging the deportation orders on them. Tariq Mehmood for the Justice for the North West 10 Campaign (j4nw10) said: ‘This is a travesty of justice, it is just to save the face of Gordon Brown and the Labour government – they know there was never any terror plot! The case is a disgrace to the British establishment!’.

Tariq Ur Rehman’s return to Pakistan came on the same day that nine Law Lords, in a major challenge to the use of secret evidence, unanimously ruled that it was unfair that individuals should be kept in ignorance of the case against them in cases of people subject to control orders.

This raises some important questions for the case of the North West 10, The Home Office uses control orders against terror suspects who cannot be tried because the intelligence being used against them is kept secret. In the case of these Pakistani students the control order is replaced by a deportation order. They cannot be tried because not a shred of evidence against was found. But they are to be deported because the Home Office considers them a threat to national security on the basis presumably of secret evidence. They have been given no information whatsoever as to the reasons why they are being deported and why they were refused bail. Yet the High Court was prepared to keep them in prison without them being given reasons at all. No wonder Tariq Ur Rehman believes there is no possibility of justice here.

In course of the new ruling on secret evidence, the senior Law Lord Lord Phillips of Worth Matravers said: “A trial procedure can never be considered fair if a party to it is kept in ignorance of the case against him.

“If the wider public are to have confidence in the justice system, they need to be able to see that justice is done rather than being asked to take it on trust.

“The best way of producing a fair trial is to ensure that a party to it has the fullest information of both the allegations that are made against him and the evidence relied upon in support of those allegations.”

As Justice (a legal group supported by many of the UK’s most eminent lawyers) put it “Secret evidence is unreliable, unfair, undemocratic, unnecessary and damaging to both national security and the integrity of Britain’s courts.”

The shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes at Stockwell Tube station in south London on July 22, 2005 was certainly an appalling tragedy. And the jury in the coroner’s inquest have been unconvinced by the police account of events, which is why they brought in an open verdict, rather than accepting it was a lawful killing.

But it is important that we examine exactly what the political issues are. I have some sympathy with Ken Livingstone’s general argument that he gave in a BBC radio interview, quoted here from the Telegraph.

“It’s an absolute tragedy. The police would do anything they could to bring back Jean Charles de Menezes, but I think we should be honest about it – he was the 53rd victim of the London bombings.”

The shooting was an act of war, and I have no doubt that the police who pulled the triggers were genuinely convinced that there was a clear and present danger of a suicide bombing. However, there were a catalogue of errors in identification and communication that amount to a systemic failure.

As Gareth Pierce, one of the lawyers representing the family of Mr de Menezes, is reported by the BBC as saying: too much attention had been put on the armed officers who shot Mr de Menezes. A better focus would be on those in command.

“The handling of the events that led up to the fatal shooting was disastrous. It was disastrous on the part of the senior officers who had a public duty and were paid to exercise that duty of care.”

The inquest had also revealed police officers had been trained to operate in what was “effectively a war situation”, but they did not know the basic terminology to use and appeared unable to set up an effective central command system with which to properly manage information.

“Jean Charles was tracked and eventually killed on the basis of a litany of assessments that ranged from ‘Not him’, ‘Possibly him’, ‘Probably him’ to the end - which propelled the armed officers - to ‘That’s him’.”

The police command and control system was inadequate for the job.

But what was the job? There were known to be potential suicide bombers at large, who were effectively prepared to carry out acts of war on and below London’s streets. From the point of view of the bombers, their actions were no morally or practically different from those American or British service personnel who had killed innocents in Iraq and Afghanistan. The dogs of war had slipped their leash, and tragically a few young British men and women were so enraged that they had joined the jihadis and saw themselves as soldiers on martyrdom missions.

The immediate duty of the British state was to protect public safety by whatever means legal and necessary, including the use of reasonable force up to and including shooting to kill.

The more long term duty of the British state, and one at which it has failed terribly, is to address the political roots of the problem, by distancing itself from the perception that they are slavish followers of the USA’s imperialist foreign policy; and to heal the wounds that this has opened up in our society.

But the immediate task of public safety fell upon a Metropolitan Police Force that clearly did not have the structures, procedures and policies in place to competently carry it out. Gareth Peirce argues that the officer commanding, Cressida Dick, was personally responsible for 25 “serious and catastrophic” failures that contributing to the fatal shooting of an innocent man.

Maybe so, but would we have been more reassured to learn that the Metropolitan Police did have a pre-planned military command structure for dealing with a war situation? If the police had been planning such a structure, wouldn’t we as the left have opposed it?

Wouldn’t we have been scandalized if we learnt that anti-war mayor, Ken Livingstone, had been complicit in advance in militarizing the police force? So shouldn’t we be generally understanding that a police force that was not prepared for military operations made mistakes in carrying them out?

In truth, the shooting of de Menezes was a tragic accident in the fog of war, by a police service being called upon to play a role that society had never before expected of them.

For me, the problem lies elsewhere. After the shooting of de Menezes, the police tried to create a smokescreen of disinformation. Press reports said that he was wearing a suspicious puffer jacket on a hot day, and acting erraticaly; We were also told that he was an illegal immigrant, a scandalous dog whistle attempt to imply that his shooting was somehow more acceptable than had he been a British citizen.

Even at the inquest the police gave evidence which the jury did not believe, that de Menezes had approached the officers on the tube train, and that the police had shouted a warning. The jury clearly did not believe the police acccount, and it is hard to avoid the conclusion that the police deliberately tried to deceive the coroner’s court, and were prepared to whitewash away the tragic errors in order to protect their own reputations.

We should accept that the police are human and make mistakes; and we should also be understanding that they were operating in a very difficult context, for which they were not fully prepared. From what I gather, the command and control systems were tested in operational conditions that they were not designed for, and their failures should not necessarily end careers of officers who had never expected to find themselves in that position.

What we should NOT accept is the unspoken assumption by the police that they are above the law, and above public accountability. The disinformation in the immediate aftermath of the shooting was scandalous, and there should be full accountability of where those lies about de Menezes came from. If the police did try to deceive the coroner’s court, as the jury seem to have believed, then that is a very serious matter

Despite a hugely worrying rate of deaths in police custody, there is a political culture that protects both individual officers and police forces from any serious investigation into why that is. A culture where the police close ranks and protect other officers who may have broken the law is corrosive of public trust, and needs to be addressed.

Over at Harpy Marx’s blog, Louise has been doing a great job of reporting the Jean Charles de Menezes inquest. In a very disturbing move the coroner has ruled that the jury are not allowed to consider the possibility that the killing by the Metropolitan Police of an innocent man was unlawful.

Now, I am not a lawyer, but this seems a perverse ruling by the coroner. His job is only to decide questions of law, and it is the jury’s job is to decide questions of fact.

Surely the killing could be manslaughter if any individual police officer was reckless as to whether they were shooting an innocent man or not? This would vitiate their defence of legal excuse. So the question whether an individual was reckless in such a way as to directly lead to an unlawful death does remain an issue of fact to be decided by the jury, not law to be decided by the coroner.

This is what Louise reported:

Today as the coroner Sir Michael Wright during the summing up of the Jean Charles de Menezes inquest stated that:“I so direct you that the evidence in this case, taken at its highest, would not justify my leaving verdicts of unlawful killing to you.”So the jury can consider only a verdict of lawful killing or an open verdict. Shooting an innocent man on the tube is not considered an unlawful killing? Again, lets protect the cops and the top brass whose incompetency, racism and macho trigger-happy behaviour was exposed during this inquest. And yet…an innocent man shot dead by cops gets no justice and neither do his family and friends.Wright further elaborates: “I’m not saying that nothing went wrong in a police operation which resulted in the killing of an innocent man. All interested persons agree that a verdict of unlawful killing could only be left to you if you could be sure that a specific officer had committed a very serious crime: murder or manslaughter,”

And the Justice4Jean campaign say: Lawyers for the Menezes family are going to the High Court today to apply for a judicial review of the Coroner’s decision on the verdict options being left for the jury. Earlier today, members of the Menezes family and their supporters walked out of court at the beginning of the Coroner’s summing up to express their dissatisfaction with the turn of events at the inquest.

This is utterly appalling and just shows what a travesty this is turning into, more cover-ups and protecting the cops who are getting away with murder. No transparency, responsibility or accountability!

I saw Gary Glitter play live at Bath University around 30 years ago, and in a kitsch sort of way he was a very good and professional performer. He was sufficiently aware of the ludicrous nature of his act to be self-deprecating.  His work was cheerful froth aimed at a young teenage audience, and therefore his “revival” in the early 1980s to recover from financial bankruptcy was a calculated pitch to nostalgia of his fans as they had become young adults.

And there is no doubt that Glitter was popular, alongside Slade, the Bay City Rollers and Suzi Quatro, he provided an innocent and upbeat soundtrack to many of our childhoods.

This is what gives added piquancy to the horror of his being revealed as a child-molester – for those of us of a certain age it has forced us to feel uncomfortable.

He is a man for whom it is difficult to find any compassion or sympathy, but the tabloid feeding frenzy about his current predicament is obscuring the real issues of sexual child abuse by making them into a circus.

Earlier this week Philip Thompson was imprisoned for being the “librarian” of an internet child molester network, that included 360 members worldwide, and the police have identified fifty of them as being in Britain. Glitter himself was originally detected due to obscene sexual images of children being found on his home computer - so his “career” as a child molester follows a terrible pattern, from internet pornography to sex-tourism.

There is no doubt that paedophilia is completely outside the bounds of social acceptability – it is impossible for an adult to have any sexual relationship with a child that is not exploitative and oppressive. So the “self-help” support groups that network paedophiles together, which seek to insulate them from the social opprobrium, and exchange advice, information and images of child abuse must be a contributory factor in encouraging some individuals to become sexually predatory who otherwise would not have. In any event, all sexual images of children involving live action photography is film of an abused victim.

So vigorous action by the police, government and social services to combat child sex crime is welcome.

But does the press agenda of demonising individual child-molesters as “monsters” aid of hinder that goal? The common sense call for draconian punishments may reflect our revulsion, but do they make children safer?

Given the high profile of Gary Glitter, his social isolation, and the relentless press pursuit of him, he will rarely if ever be in a position to abuse children, especially if he is forced to return to Britain, and banned from foreign travel.

The horror of child abduction and abuse by strangers is thankfully very rare. The real threats are more typically close to home.

And this is the problem with the prurient and sensationalist press coverage – it makes children less safe.

Child abuse in the family is a terrible abuse of trust, and is very complicated. The children themselves feel guilty and often feel responsible – a relative of mine was abused by his step-father when he was very young, and never told anyone for more than 25 years.

But if a child does come forward and say what is happening to them, then if the abuser doesn’t seem like a stereotypical monster, then the child is less likely to be believed; and if the punishments are too draconian then this makes it more likely that the crime will be covered up, or the child will feel guilty for destroying the family.

Child sexual abuse is a very serious problem, but our society doesn’t face up to the reality. Child molesters often don’t match the stereotypes. They may do monstrous things, but they are not monsters. Indeed the demonisation makes it harder to deal with other aspects of the problem, for example, men who use prostitutes who may be under 16 are typically not treated as child abusers.

I have a personal interest in knife crime. Several years ago my nephew was sent to prison for three years for stabbing someone outside a nightclub in Bristol. It was his second conviction.

Nephews and nieces can be close or distant relatives, as it happens my nephew had been brought up alongside me as my younger brother and we were very intimate as children.

It is not fair to discuss his personal circumstances, but those at risk of becoming perpetrators of crime have a fairly well defined social profile, (as I have discussed before here). He was failed by my family, by his school, and by the police. One day perhaps the history will be written about how certain police officers colluded with drug gangs, but it is more likely that the truth will never see the light.

It is also worth saying that for all those people who have been tried and convicted of crime, there are many others who were simply never caught for things they did in their teenage years and who have left such behaviour behind them long ago, as they get respectable jobs, and become homeowners and fathers. Perhaps I know some of those people as well.

Or as Alastair Duff, Sherriff for Tayside Central and Fife describes this:

“What I have found over the years is that most of them give up committing crime and they give up not for reasons associated with the way the criminal justice system has dealt with them. Rather they give up because of a change in their lives elsewhere …. Usually it is some other factor … they finally get a job where they didn’t have a job, they meet a good woman, or their granny dies or some other life event that sort of brings them up short. … They grow up and out of it”

The most effective way of minimising crime would therefore be to pro-actively target the young people who have the social profile that suggests they are likely to commit crime, and intervene to ensure that they are helped, given purpose, a sense of direction, physical and emotional support and a hope for the future. This would need to go hand in hand with a policy of decriminalising drugs, to treat drug addiction as a medical not a criminal problem, thus decoupling addiction from crime.

As Louise Whittle has explained here, quite the opposite is currently the case:

“The Youth Justice Board that was set up in 1998 and commits 64% of its budget on commissioning custodial places and a meagre 5% on prevention. The youth justice board isn’t meeting the needs of young people and children such as mental health, housing, drug dependency, education, employment and training but rather pushing the whole ideology of the ASBOisation and stigmatisation of youth”

The culture of our society positively demonises young people. There was a recent report in the Swindon local paper of the council threatening ASBOs to 12 year olds for playing football, thus putting them into the path of the criminal justice system for behaviour that would in most communities be seen as completely normal. For financial reasons most young people are excluded from sports facilities, cafes or social clubs, even where such facilities are available. In some cases facilities are available but don’t provide a safe environment.

Nevertheless, crime and anti-social behaviour is blighting life in too many working class areas and the concern about knife crime is both real and justified. As the Norwegian criminologist, Nils Christie has written, the left cannot “ignore the crime or unwanted acts – too often the liberal position. That is very wrong. These acts must be reacted to, otherwise your society is not alive.”

But as Nils points out: “But who said you should react with pain delivery? Who said you shouldn’t try to make it good again? Don’t forget the victim. Lawyers steal other people’s conflicts: we need to give them back to the people directly concerned.”

Nils Christie is not just any academic, his ideas have been adopted by the Norwegain government, as he explains himself:

There is really an interesting development these days in Norway – a new law has set up a body to handle conflicts. It provides a way to take cases away from the criminal-law system and gets people to talk to each other and try to come up with a kind of contract, whereby the person who has done something silly is given a chance to make it good again. There is a war between civil society and crime-control society – the state in its most primitive, punitive form.

Civil society is building up alternative ways of handling conflict. We need to find ideas from the native cultures and our own past, when the state was not so strong. In Aotearoa/New Zealand and Australia they have gone a long way in dealing with young offenders in such ways. Norway is the only European society that created such bodies and last year they handled four to five thousand cases. I feel great optimism about this alternative to penal approaches.

Nevertheless, in Britain we live in a society with a developed culture of imprisonment, and the social perception is that prison is necessary to show that a crime is considered serious. (The paradoxical Conservative tradition of reducing prison populations in the 1930s has been forgotten). Prison can be used to both remove people who are a danger to society from circulation, and also as a strong social indicator of disapproval. But the evidence suggests that longer sentances doesn’t increase deterrence, and  suspended sentences don’t decrease deterence.

Although overall violent crime has decreased year on year, Deputy Assistant Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, Alf Hitchcock told the Times that it is ”hugely worrying that the annual number of hospital admissions for knife injuries had risen in recent years from 3,000 to 5,000 while the age of those carrying and using knives had fallen steeply.”

The Times adds: “Mr Hitchcock, who speaks on knife crime for the Association of Chief Police Officers, added: “Recently we have seen the emergence of a worrying trend in relation to knife crime. We see both an intensification in the severity of offending, and a worrying change in the age profile of offenders and victims, which has decreased from mid-late teens to early twenties down to early-to-mid-teens.”

So there is a legitimate worry about rising knife crime- particularly among young people. In this context, the idea of always prosecuting, or even always giving a suspended prison sentence are not necessarily illiberal or wrong. A suspended sentence that becomes fully effective on a repeat conviction is a strong deterrent, as are the continental practices of sending people to prison only for weekends. But the worry is that the calls for mandatory prison sentences are being used as just a political football by Conservative politicians seeking to make capital out of other peoples’ real problems.

In contrast, the current government proposals contain both good and bad elements.

The bad element is that increasing stop and search powers, increased supervision of the alleged 110000 “problem families” and more visible policing, are largely gimmicks that feed into the mythologized demonisation of young people. What is signally missing from the proposals announced so far is any change in course on the failed strategies of dealing with drugs, any systematic approach to providing help and support for young people at risk, or any expansion of facilities for young people to give them affordable, creative and constructive options for their leisure time.

However, there is also some recognition in the government’s proposals that meeting with victims and their families, being made aware of the consequences of violent crime, and even visiting convicted prisoners can have a constructive effect on changing attitudes. The government should also be congratulated that they have resisted the attempt by the Tories to start a race to the bottom in terms of more and more alarmist and draconian sanctions. The media led moral panic must be resisted, as it creates a climate where politicians respond not to the real world problems but simply to assuage the press.

There is some good sense on this subject from both Harpy Marx, and Dave Osler

Today, Frances Done, the new head of the Youth Justice Board for England and Wales gave her first media interview to the BBC. The Youth Justice Board (YJB) is a public body that oversees the youth justice system in England and Wales.

Currently there are about 2,900 10 to 17-year-olds locked up in secure children’s homes, secure training centres and young offender institutions, in England and Wales.

The salient fact is that incarceration is not effective at reducing youth crime. Edinburgh University’s study of Youth Transitions and Crime tracked 4300 children over eight years. It found that those youngsters who have contact with the Criminal Justice System are less likely to stop offending than those who don’t. Or as Alastair Duff, Sherriff for Tayside Central and Fife describes it:

“What I have found over the years is that most of them give up committing crime and they give up not for reasons associated with the way the criminal justice system has dealt with them. Rather they give up because of a change in their lives elsewhere …. Usually it is some other factor … they finally get a job where they didn’t have a job, they meet a good woman, or their granny dies or some other life event that sort of brings them up short. … They grow up and out of it”

It is very clear from the statistics that the underlying social problems that lead people into crime are related to drug and drink dependency, mental distress, having run away from home as a child, lack of qualifications and homelessness.

In particular with youth crime, once the social factors are removed or ameliorated, then crime decreases. But imprisonment actually decreases the chances of the underlying problems being addressed. This is true both at an individual level, as a prison record carries a stigma for future employment, and some youngsters also find some self definition as being a criminal. It is also true at a societal level, as the huge cost of the prison-industrial complex diverts public funds away from preventative measures.

It is good news that Frances Done has said she is determined to “drive the numbers down”. She wants the courts to make greater use of community penalties.

But it is worrying that she argues that the way to do this is to “ensure that judges and magistrates felt confident that community sentences were “robust” enough alternatives to locking people up.”

This still seems to be making an assumption that a prison sentence is normative and any alternative must be judged against imprisonment, rather that approaching the question of how young people can be steered away from crime by whatever is the most effective way. We should not be judging sentances by their “robustness” but by their effectiveness in crime reduction.

We have to recognise that there is a strong cultural presumption towards prison in England and Wales as being an appropriate response to crime. However, the explosion in prison numbers has been very specifically within the last twenty years, and mainly under the current Labour government.

When Labour came to Government in May 1997, the prison population in England and Wales was 60,131, in February 2008 the prison population was 82020. Previously it took four decades (1954-1994) for the prison population to rise by 25,000, The Labour Party have managed to increase the numbers by nearly 22000 in just ten years.

The number of women in prison has increased particularly dramatically under Labour. In 1994 the average female prison population was 1,811. Five years later in 1999 it stood at 3,247.  In February 2008 there were 4479 Women prisoners.

What is interesting is that other European countries, that have similar social and demographic characteristics to England and Wales both imprison far fewer people, and also have less crime. England and Wales is the prison capital of the European Union with a record average incarceration rate of 141, per 100,000 of the population, according to official Home Office figures. The figures, published in the world prison population list, show that England and Wales is even outstripping the imprisonment rate of Libya, Burma, Malaysia and Turkey.

A parliamentary answer recently revealed that of the 96,017 people sentenced to prison in 2006, 62% received a sentence of six months or less (Hansard, 28 January 2008; column 137w). These people receiving short sentences would be ideal candidates for alternatives to prison, that would be more cost effective, and better aimed at reducing crime.

With specific regard to young offenders, the underlying social problems of homelessness, drugs and substance abuse, personality disorders, bullying, exclusion from school, parental abuse etc need to be addressed at source.

There is evidence that young people hanging around are likely to come into contact wiith the police. But where are young people to go? There are simply not enough facilities available for young people, at an affordable price, to keep them amused and out of trouble. The government’s Respect agenda demands that young people respect their elders, but doesn’t honour their own side of the contract: young people are not respected or provided for.

With regard to the concern that knife crime may lead to more young people being sent to prison, there is indeed a good left case for compulsory imprisonment for carrying knives or guns. As Tommy Sheridan argues, sending people to prison for long terms for having used a knife is shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted: it is carrying the weapons that leads to them being used.

Sheridan says: “I don’t accept the so called knife carrying “culture”. It is an anti-social cancer and should be referred to as such. Of course, mandatory sentences for knife carrying or longer sentences for knife use in and of themselves ill do little to tackle the cancer of violence. We need a multi faceted approach that involves a full frontal assault on poverty and hopelessness and the anger it spawns. Every community requires readily accessible and appropriate facilities to host constructive recreational pursuits….. If such an investment strategy were married to concerted education campaigns utilising schools, colleges, the media and peer idols in the fields of music, film and sports then we could establish knife carrying as the completely unacceptable practice it is. The socialist movement has zero tolerance of racism, domestic violence and sexism. Zero tolerance of violence and the practise of knife carrying has to be added to that list.”

The important question that Sheridan is addressing here, is that it is appropriate to use prison as an effective tool for enforcing a highly desirable shift in public behaviour; but to be effective then the sanction of prison must be narrowly targeted to only specific crimes related mainly to public safety, and must also be linked to a commitment to addressing the underlying social and individual causes of crime.

Read more about prisons at Harpy Marx