POLITICS
Why we need a more humane system of criminal justice for young offenders
BRUCE ANDERSON
Gloomy weather: gloomier news. Mur- ders in Zimbabwe vie for the headlines with a murder trial in Norfolk, and both provoke feelings of impotent rage. But there the par- allel should end. In the British countryside at least, we need not be powerless. If our squires and farmers feel that they too are under siege, it is because the forces of order are failing to discharge their basic duties.
Senior policemen are much to blame for this. Anyone who talks to officers in the armed forces cannot fail to be struck by the amount of time they spend thinking about their profession. But our police seem to lack a central nervous system. As a result, they merely plod on down well-trodden paths of failure.
About a generation ago, robbers learned to use motor cars, which gave them a tech- nological edge over the police. But there is no reason why the police should not deploy counter-measures. Isolated farmhouses will always be at risk; you cannot have a patrol vehicle in every farmyard. But what about video cameras, hidden alarms linked to the police net, tiny markings on valuable prop- erty; perhaps, even, a tiny radio transmit- ter? Has every chief constable worked out which rural residences in his patch are like- ly targets and encouraged the owners to take counter measures? Any answers in the negative are evidence of thoughtlessness.
Thought, however, will not eliminate all burglaries. Once they have occurred, the police need to be relentless in pursuit of the swag. Given the scale of the burgling industry, Britain's antique shops must be awash with looted heirlooms. Lots of respectable dealers, who would be outraged if accused of being fences, avoid enquiring too closely about the provenance of goods offered at tempting prices by unlikely ven- dors. If such property were likely to be reclaimed on its lawful owner's behalf, and without compensation to the dealer, the price of stolen antiques would drop rapidly. That would diminish the attraction of bur- glary, and longer sentences could also help; there must be some equivalence between crime and punishment.
That said, we should not overestimate the value of deterrent sentences. Those who retain their faith in deterrence should ponder the experience of a mid 19th- century clergyman attached to Newgate Gaol who attended around 120 prisoners in the death cell (I have mislaid the exact ref- erence and would be grateful to any reader who could supply it). All but four of those men awaiting the gallows had themselves witnessed a public hanging.
It is not easy to deter the young male criminal; most criminals are young males. Deterrence needs to start earlier, at an age when criminal tendencies can still be sti- fled. This is not impossible. Though there is a lot of despairing talk about the under- class, it is neither as numerous as the dis- may it arouses would suggest, nor so intractable. About 50 per cent of all crimes are committed by 5 per cent of males between the ages of 14 and 25; in other words, around a quarter of a million peo- ple. Let us deem them to be the core of the underclass — they are certainly its military wing — and let us assume that they have around seven relatives who are either for- mer criminals, future criminals, or the like- ly parents of a subsequent criminal genera- tion. That gives us an underclass of around two million. If the other 53 million of us cannot subject that two million to a much greater degree of coercion than at present, we should be ashamed of ourselves.
On Jesuit principles — give me a child until the age of seven — that coercion should start early. In any pre-prep school, the schoolmistresses will no doubt be able to identify likely future Oxbridge scholars. In any inner-city primary school, it would be equally possible to identify the likely future Dartmoor scholars. So we must take steps to disrupt this cursus malorum. Every family of young children on state benefit (child benefit excepted) should be required to sign a con- tract. Under it, the parents would have to ensure that their children arrived at school washed, breakfasted and on time. They should not have spent half the night watching pornographic videos. Should they commit a crime — the age of criminal responsibility being reduced to eight — they should, as now, be cautioned for a minor first offence. But any serious or subsequent offence would bring a court appearance, and a sentence to be of good behaviour for a certain number of weeks of the school term, with report cards to be signed twice a day, and bad report cards requiring a visit to the local police sta- tion. Repeated bad report cards would mean an extension of the sentence, plus detention on Saturdays. The parents would be crimi- nally liable if they failed to ensure their child's attendance. The parents of apprentice criminals would, indeed, be subject to con- stant harassment. When one of Jamie Bul- ger's murderers was arrested, his mother, who did not then realise what had happened, demonstrated the need for such measures. 'I told you this would happen if you continued to bunk off school,' she said complacently. In future, such social security-funded maternal neglect should not be an option, nor should truancy. Until he amends his behaviour, the young criminal should be made to feel like a toad under the harrow.
This whole process should be supervised by a new cadre of social/probation workers, recruited principally from the armed forces and from the ranks of unemployed early middle-aged managers. They should only require a brief training, having demonstrat- ed that they already possess diplomas in leadership and common sense. They should each be given a caseload of underclass fam- ilies and aspirant criminals, and a signifi- cant proportion of their salaries should come from bonuses, earned by their clients' good behaviour. This could all be financed by large-scale redundancies among current- ly employed social workers and probation officers who are useless: there would be no shortage of candidates.
If the early school-based treatment does not work, it should be supplemented by real short, sharp shocks: brief periods of impris- onment under a knackering regimen of drills, runs, cold showers et al, plus rigorous proba- tion. Those tempted to kick against the pricks would know that the shocks would be administered as often as was necessary. The aim should be to make the would-be crimi- nal's life as unpleasant as possible.
Anyone who believes that such measures are inhumane should contrast them with the treatment meted out to Fred Barras, who was shot by Tony Martin. Young Fred first encountered the criminal justice system when he was 12, and by the time he was killed, he had ratcheted up 28 further detect- ed offences, and had developed a contempt for the law. If he had been told about kicking against the pricks, he would have given a key word a non-Biblical meaning. But at the end, he learned an old lesson: that the criminal is often his own principal victim. There is noth- ing humane about nerveless acquiescence in criminality. By taking vigorous action to pre- vent children drifting towards crime, we can ensure more humane conditions for every- one, including the potential criminals.
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