This soft justice is a betrayal of the British people
VIOLENT crime continues to spread its malignancy across Britain. Only yesterday, in an appalling incident that would have been unthinkable a few decades ago, a three-year-old child was seriously injured by an acid attack in Worcester.
The weekend also saw a man in his twenties shot dead in Wolverhampton. In response the police mounted armed patrols on the streets.
These two shocking cases follow the publication last week of the latest crime statistics, which catalogue in the starkest terms Britain’s accelerating descent into lawlessness.
In the year up to the end of March 2018, the police recorded 5.5 million offences, a rise of 13 per cent on the previous year. Almost every type of crime showed an increase. The murder rate rose by 12 per cent, reaching the highest total for a decade, while robberies went up by 30 per cent, sexual offences by 24 per cent and knife crimes by 16 per cent.
George Orwell wrote that “the gentleness of English civilisation is its most marked characteristic”. Such a description would be tragically inappropriate today, given how our society is now plagued by thuggery and theft.
What makes the surge in crime all the more alarming is the utter impotence of the authorities. Offenders laugh at the justice system because there is little chance they will be caught, never mind convicted.
Last week’s figures also revealed that 90 per cent of crimes did not result in anyone being charged or brought to court. In fact, nearly half of all cases were closed by the police because they were unable to identify any suspects.
INSTEAD of getting tough in the face of this barbarism our politicians remain cocooned in their culture of denial. That feebleness was highlighted by the Home Office Minister Nick Hurd, who tried to downplay the latest survey by claiming, with no justification, that “the likelihood of being a victim remains low”.
Hurd then resorted to a cocktail of bureaucratic jargon and sociological claptrap about “our Serious Violence Strategy” and declared crime “is becoming increasingly complex”. This is just pathetic excuse-making. In fact, offences such as murder, knifing and robbery are all too simple in their nihilistic savagery.
Even worse than Hurd was his Government colleague David Gauke, the Justice Secretary. In a desperate interview last week, he called for an even softer policy on crime, with less use of jail terms and more rehabilitation. Sounding like the limp Mr Barrowclough from the TV comedy Porridge, he said that the aim is to provide “hope” for prisoners.
Gauke would do far better if he concentrated on bringing hope to the public by a reassurance that criminals will actually be punished.
Yet the Justice Secretary seems to have swallowed the idea, sedulously cultivated by the anti-prison lobby, that too many offenders are sent to jail in England. This is just politically motivated nonsense. In our spineless justice system, it is some achievement to end up behind bars. A recent study by the independent think tank Civitas demonstrated that last year just a third of all criminals convicted of violence went to jail. Even half of those with 11 to 14 convictions avoided prison. Just as worryingly, only one per cent of people found guilty of drugs possession received custodial sentences.
A strong penal approach should be a vital weapon against criminality. It is a fallacy to claim, as progressive campaigners do, that “prison doesn’t work”. Once they are locked inside, offenders cannot menace the public. That is why there was a significant drop in crime once the prison population began to rise from the mid-1990s, a trend started by Tory Home Secretary Michael Howard and subsequently adopted by Blair’s Labour Government.
The success of this policy bewildered Left-wing commentators, one of whom wrote: “Despite falling crime, prisoner numbers are surging.” In reality, the former was a consequence of the latter. But sadly the pattern has now been reversed, with prisoner numbers down by more than 5,000 since their 2011 peak. And the results are all too clear.
Gauke bleats about the ineffectiveness of short jail sentences. But that is an argument, not for surrender, but for far longer terms and more spartan regimes.
COMMUNITY sanctions – beloved by the antiprison brigade – are not an alternative. Because they are so undemanding, they fail to deter criminals. Because they allow offenders to remain at large, they fail to protect the public. Moreover, they insult law-abiding workers in jobs such as street cleaning or graffiti removal by portraying such tasks as demeaning enough to be judicial punishment.
The entire justice system is failing miserably. Gripped by the fashionable notion that criminals are really victims of society in need of support, it has lost its integrity. Reductions in the jail population would only be further lunacy at a time of dramatically rising crime.
The Government should be building more prisons and pushing for more rigorous sentences, if necessary with money from the bloated foreign aid budget. Compared with the cost of soaring criminality, an expansion of the jail system is a financial bargain and a moral imperative. More soft justice would be a betrayal of the British public.
‘Our politicians remain in denial about crime’