‘Posh’ Lavinia is just the latest thug set to get out of jail free
PLEASE don’t tell me that Oxford student Lavinia Woodward may be spared prison because she is posh. Actually, she may be spared prison because our j ustice system is made of mush. Ms Woodward, who has admitted unlawfully wounding her boyfriend, has been told by a judge that she might not be going to prison when she is sentenced in September. Several reports suggested this was because of her supposedly exceptional talents. Humph.
She is said to have punched the young man, swiped at him with a bread knife and then stabbed him in the leg before hurling a laptop computer, a glass and a jam jar at him.
These events are said to have been part of a ‘ drink and drugfuelled row’.
Ms Woodward is also supposed to have suffered from that non-existent problem, ‘drug addiction’. There is no such thing. No objective, falsifiable test exists to show its presence in the human body. It is just a big fat excuse for human weakness.
Millions of people (including thousands of American soldiers in Vietnam) turn out to be perfectly well able to overcome this supposedly irresistible force when it suits them. Yet it is widely accepted, especially by our justice system, as a partial or total excuse for all kinds of selfish and criminal behaviour. Those who claim to suffer from it are treated as if they are ill, rather than as the selfish causes of other people’s suffering.
It’s everywhere. You don’t have to be called Lavinia, or be studying for a medical degree at a picturesque college, to be let off. Read any local newspaper (including Oxford’s) and see magistrates and judges giving second, third and fourth ‘chances’ to alleged ‘addicts’ who have been violent or dishonest. Like Ms Woodward, they had lawyers or social workers to say they’d had ‘very troubled lives’ or had ‘been abused’.
But because their crimes happen in tower blocks, or in streets where there are dead fridges and mattresses in the front gardens, and don’t involve grand colleges made famous by Evelyn Waugh in Brideshead Revisited, these cases don’t get picked up by national media. Lavinia and her less fortunate equivalents have all grown up in a world where bad deeds have no consequences. Not all that long ago, serious trouble followed drug abuse and violence. Those involved went straight to prison, which in those days was run by the officers, not the inmates, and no doubt it was extremely harsh for them. But in my view it was kinder in the long run than what we do now. Pri s on is t here to frighten us into behaving well. But these days it doesn’t, because unless you actually kill somebody you have to try so very, very hard to get in.
Buy illegal drugs and the police will ignore it. Break into someone’s house or be quite seriously violent and you’ll get off with a fine.
Last week it was revealed that ten criminals a week commit serious offences while on probation. A probation officers’ union leader said: ‘Offenders are being phoned up and asked, “Have you committed a crime since I last spoke to you?” ’
Eventually, after a mile-long trail of cautions, unpaid fines, community service, probation and suspended sentences that are never activated, the lawbreaker ends up, to his mild surprise, actually going to prison, if not for very long.
The numbers of such people increase all the time. For the weird paradox of this is that we have hopelessly overcrowded jails, but they don’t deter anyone from committing crime.
By then, the offender has introduced pain, misery and fear – often permanently – into the lives of dozens of others. He is hopelessly far along the road of crime and will probably only stop when he gets too old.
Even worse, others will have watched his fate and drawn the reasonable conclusion that they, too, will get away with crime.
Some of them will be called Lavinia. Most of them won’t be.