Scandal of rape figures
ACRISIS is coming if people lose faith in British justice because they see criminals getting away with hideous crimes. People who terrorise our communities will be the winners if despairing victims no longer want to go through the court system and witnesses refuse to cooperate.
Victims’ Commissioner Dame Vera Baird is alarmed there were 58,657 complaints concerning rape last year but a mere 1,925 prosecutions.
There is a perception among victims, she warned, that “rape is being decriminalised”.
This is horrific and intolerable. Our police and prosecutors need financial resources, political support and powers to put the most evil people in our society behind bars.
IF THE old political saying is true, that the flak is most intense when you are directly over the target, then Home Secretary Priti Patel must be flying a spot-on mission because the senior reaches of the Home Office have started to brief heavily against her.
They are unhappy over her planned shake-up of the immigration system and her determination to crack down on crime, including getting police to take a more muscular approach against climate protesters and the courts to stop mollycoddling prolific repeat offenders.
Apparently, Ms Patel is such a demanding boss that officials have been struggling to keep up with the workload she is giving them, encompassing such things as deporting foreign criminals at a faster rate and being ready to implement the new pointsbased immigration arrangements by the start of next year.
Some senior officials are allegedly complaining about her “bullying” approach and one was so stressed he was hospitalised and found to have a sodium deficiency.
QUITE why the Home Secretary should be held to blame for a dietary issue is not explained. Only Dominic Cummings, the Prime Minister’s chief adviser, is seen as a greater threat by the unelected liberal establishment than Ms Patel and is thus being subjected to an even more intense campaign of anonymous, trouble-making leaks and poisonous briefings.
Alongside Brexit, the NHS and life in the towns of the former “Red Wall” that turned Tory in December, Ms Patel’s brief is one of the core areas where the Government simply must deliver beneficial change.
This newspaper’s exclusive story yesterday about the astonishing leniency of the courts in the face of serious repeat offenders shows that a comprehensive change of culture is required across the criminal justice system. It is just not on for callous offenders who victimise their communities with depressing regularity to be left at large despite being caught in the act and successfully prosecuted.
All four purposes of prison – punishment, deterrence, containment and rehabilitation – are important if public confidence in the system is to be bolstered. And while it is good to see Ms Patel, along with Justice Secretary Robert Buckland and new Attorney General Suella Braverman, gearing up to ensure prisons are austere places that punish and deter serious crime and safely lock away those who would otherwise continue to offend, much more must also be done to rehabilitate those whose lives have followed the wrong track.
We need the classic “joinedup government” approach that is so often recommended but so rarely in evidence. Huge numbers of prison places are occupied by those suffering from serious mental health problems, drug dependency, lack of basic literacy and numeracy and who were brought up in the institutional care system without parental guidance. Some would undoubtedly be better dealt with elsewhere, while those who do merit a custodial sentence would clearly benefit from intense rehabilitation programmes.
Given that one advantage of holding them securely is an ability for the state to control their whereabouts, the failure to properly resource prison-based mental health therapies, drug treatment programmes, remedial lessons and prison work is unforgivable.
SO TOO is the chronic underfunding of a probation service that must supervise these offenders when they are released and the paucity of programmes to remove those ready to make a fresh start from the reach of traditional criminal associates.
Once rigour and toughness has been reintroduced into the criminal justice system, there must also be a role for tenderness. The British public is, in general, a fair-minded bunch.
When Ms Patel has squeezed the excesses of a muddleheaded approach out of the system, many voters will wish to know that every opportunity to reform and live a constructive future life is being offered to prison inmates.
All of this will require an uplift in resources as well as a change of mindset. More police, more prison officers, more specialist prison staff, a determined focus on ensuring nobody leaves school unable to read, write or do basic sums and more support to prevent family breakdown in our poorest communities are all essential ingredients in the new war on crime.
Ms Patel has always seemed to me to be made of the right stuff and will surely not allow the negative briefings to deflect her. Far from being laid low, she has the potential to become one of the great home secretaries of modern times.