Open Writing

Back in the 1970s when everyone was desperately searching for a solution to mounting juvenile crime the then Home Secretary and Deputy Tory leader Willy Whitelaw came up with a well-intentioned but hairbrained scheme.

It was called the short, sharp sentence. Unfortunately it was neither short nor sharp and Lord Whitelaw as he later became - and the civil servants who advised him - must shoulder some of the blame for the spriraling crime rate which a depleted and demoralised police force cannot adequately cope with.

The former war hero was affable, courteous and honest - qualities lacking in some of our present day politicians - but his judgment was poor. He rightly thought that if you could shock a youngster into not embarking on a life of crime at the age of 14 or 15 he would steer clear of trouble for the rest of his life.

What he should have done was to send them to an adult prison for a week, locked up for twenty three hours a day behind bars - which is exactly what they are doing now in some American states.

But instead the courts were encouraged to send them to detention centres for three months after which time they would come out determined to go straight.At least that was the idea. But it never worked and a great opportunity was lost.

A probation officer friend of mine who visited teenagers at a Yorkshire detention centre explained it to me. “After a week they were crying. After a fortnight they were still crying but not quite so much. At the end of the first month they had settled in and were thinking it was not so bad after all.

“After two months they were enjoying the regime. They had got wise to all the dodges that make life easier while in custody and were lording it over the new inmates. By the time they were ready for release they were arrogant and cocky and ready to put into practice what they had learned while inside in order to embark on a life of crime.”

So what went wrong? My friend explained, “Instead of three months in a detention centre, magistrates should have been allowed to send juvenile offenders to an adult prison for just a week, or maybe a fortnight, and kept in a cell behind bars for 23 hours a day.

“They would have been told, ‘This is what you can expect in the future if you embark on a life of crime.’ That short, sharp sentence would have been such a shock that there would have been every chance they would not offend again.”

So why not try it now? Can you imagine the outcry there would now be from our liberal, human rights lobby. You could hear them screaming, “You couldn’t
do that. These youngsters would be scarred for life.”

But what about the victims of crime, who are often scarred mentally or physically or both for many years, sometimes for life.

Recent Home Office research has shown that a hard core of 3,500 teenagers are responsible for one in four crimes committed by young people in Britain, amounting to hundreds of thousands of offences every year. Another Home Office study suggests that one per cent of the country’s young people, many of them as young as 12, could be responsible for half of all crime, indicating that 200,000 young people could be committing ten million crimes a year.

Those figures paint a pretty depressing picture, particularly when it is revealed that only one in five who are caught receive any form of punishment.

No-one is suggesting that we turn the clock back to an age when draconian sentences were passed for even minor thefts, but surely there has to be some relationship between crime and punishment. As things are there is very little.

For many years the Home Office has put pressure on magistrates and Crown court judges to avoid locking up juveniles and adults because of the costs involved and because our prisons and young offender institutions are bursting at the seams, so much so that those in charge of them are releasing offenders before they have completed their sentences.

A few years ago the law makers had a bright idea. To avoid so many people being sent to prison they labelled probation and community service orders as custodial sentences, instead of what they had always been - alternatives to custody. The logic behind that sleight of hand was that both probation and community service are infringements of the offender’s liberty. For example when the offender who has been put on probation has to stay at home to receive a visit from the probation officer or has to visit the probation office it is a terrible inconvenience and infringes his or hers liberty.

And when the criminal who is told to do eighty hours community service spread out over a twelve months period, which is less than two hours a week, you can see how that terrible punishment is going to deter him from committing further offences.

More and more we are being subjected to European law culminating in the recent Human Righs Act which gives the criminal the same rights as the victim, to such an extent that we are going to find it increasingly difficult to seize a criminal’s assets which he has amassed from crime, making a mockery of the long-established tenent of British law that a criminal must not be allowed to enjoy the benefits of his wrong-doing. Who says crime doesn’t pay?.

Of course we all know that the best way to cut crime is to eradicate its causes which are many and varied and not just down to poverty and poor environment, drugs and unemployment. Successive governments have failed to tackle the problem adequately but until a long-term solution is found society has to be protected from those who are determined to live an anti-social life.

More than forty years as a freelance journalist during which I have covered courts at all levels has convinced me that the time has come for new laws to be introduced giving greater powers to the police and the courts. The trend has to be reversed by scrapping or at least drastically amending legislation brought in more than thirty years ago. It went under the official name of PACE - the Police and Criminal Evidence Act - and was welcomed by the country’s criminal fraternity who nicknamed it the Thieves Charter.

The Act, which is still in operation, stacks the odds heavily in favour of the criminal, limiting, as it does, the powers of the police in the way they investigate crime and arrest suspects. For example, police are no longer able to trick criminals into confessing to their crimes and so have been shorne of one vital part of their battle armour - - the ability to trap those who are guilty of crimes.

Quite often police will spend weeks or months preparing a file on a case only for the Crown Prosecution Service to decide that the evidence is not strong enough to secure a conviction with the result that many criminals go free. And when the police do get their man - or woman - to court magistrates with very limited powers are forced to impose derisory sentences because of Home Office directives to avoid sending people to prison if at all possible.

Our Crown courts have become a joke with around half of all defendants who are tried there being found not guilty by juries whose numbers include young, out of work, uneducated people who have little experience of life and are reluctant to send defendants to prison. It really is about time that the jury system was either abolished or altered in some way to try and ensure that criminals don’t walk free from court.

The sentencing powers of magistrates and judges are also governed by the plea entered by a defendant. The law says that magistrates and Crown Court judges must take into account a defendant’s “remorse”. Surprising though it may seem if he pleads guilty to the offence - even though he may have been caught red handed and has no option - he is deemed to be showing remorse. Of course if he says in court that he is sorry whether he or the solicitor representing him really means it that reduces the punishment even more.

I don’t know just how much Joe Public cares, but surely it must be a source of puzzlement to many that the law says that except for the most serious offences in the criminal calendar defendents imprisoned for up to four years - which applies to a big proportion of our prison population - serve only half their sentence. Above four years and they are supposed to serve two thirds, but that can be cut at the discretion of the prison governor.

Isn’t that crazy? How is that fitting the punishment to the crime?

The whole system of sentencing in our courts is in a mess and no wonder morale is at such a low ebb and why more policemen are leaving the service than are being recruited . Low pay being offered to prospective new recruits and the scrapping of living allowances for them are other reasons we are not attracting more people to the service.

More cash is needed to fund the resources we need. Why not divert some of the enormous sums of money being unnecessarily wasted on legal aid to the fight against crime. I hope some of my friends in the legal profession will not mind my saying that for many years legal aid has been a licence to print money - and unfortunately it also had a bearing on the increase in offences which of course was not intended.

Let me explain. Until fairly recently when a solicitor representing a defendant was granted legal aid he was paid not for the case as a whole but for each court appearance.So every time a case was adjourned there was a further legal aid payment for the solicitor. Very often these adjournments, normally for four weeks, were for social inquiry or medical reports and there were many instances of a defendant pleading not guilty at the magistrates court and electing trial by jury and then eventually admitting the offence at Crown court. So a case could take many weeks or months to be dealt with while the defendant happily committed further offences while on bail. That I can assure you happened in many instances.

Nowadays legal aid for criminal cases is not quite the gravy train it once was because a legal aid payment covers the case as a whole no matter how long it takes. Not surprisingly, you may think, there has been a big drop in the number of adjournments though to be fair the reason for some of that reduction is that the need for social inquiry reports in many cases has been dispensed with.

Many of the less serious cases in the magistrates courts are now being “fast-tracked” - which means being dealt with as soon as possible, often at the defendant’s first appearance in court. Instead of a social inquiry report - if one is needed - the case is adjourned for maybe an hour or two while a probation officer makes a few inquiries or talks to the defendant and then gives a report to the bench - exactly as it happened back in the 1950’s when I first reported cases at the magistrates court.

Despite the changes in the law vast sums are still being spent unwisely on legal aid and it really is about time that we reversed the trend and put the needs of the victims above those of the criminals. Our prisons are horrendously overcrowded and we know that many people in them need treatment the prison service is not equipped to provide. Sad though it is to say, until a long term solution is found- if it ever will - we will have to find the cash to built more prisons. You may say that is a pretty negative approach but - and it has been said many times - while the criminal is locked up we can sleep a little easier in our beds.

Those who are determined to break the law and make life difficult for the rest of us must be punished,though at the same time,of course, rehabilitated if at all possible. We failed in the 1970s to prevent young wrong-doers growing into hardened criminals and are now reaping the “rewards”.