4 MAY 1985, Page 25

CENTREPIECE

To make the punishment fit the crime

COLIN WELCH

No, long ago the New Statesman pub- lished an excellent article by Richard Kin- sey and Jock Young about crime and the working-class poor. I'm sure the Spectator would have been proud to print it, had it been offered. Yet it may have done ten times as much good where it was, if we presume that Statesman readers are dafter than the Spectator's, not least on this embarrassing topic. The authors surveyed Merseyside. They found that the poorer you are, the more you fear crime and suffer by it. In poor inner-city Liverpool, 45 per cent of the population had been burgled in the past 12 months, in richer areas only three per cent. Crime is seen as a major problem by the poor (66 per cent), less so by the prosperous (13 per cent). A quarter of the poor dare not go out after dark. Are lone women at risk after nightfall? In the poor areas 76 per cent thought so, in prosperous areas only 14 per cent. The poor demand protection, not modishly against the police (Mr Kaufman, please note) but against criminals. In poor areas 90 per cent, including young working-class males, want to see more police on patrol. Labour's failure to take crime and policing seriously is to the authors 'a disgrace forged of dogma and short-sightedness'. The dogma is that crime is a 'a Tory issue'. The short-sightedness is that of not un- typical Statesman readers, white, middle- aged, middle-class, male, enlightened, progressive, utterly ignorant and neglectful of the real fears and interests of those Whose miseries they exploit and ululate about — women, the poor and unem- ployed, the old.

What the authors didn't ask, or didn't report, was what the poor think about Punishment. No one ever does. Progres- sive criminologists, 'experts' and 'enlight- ened' politicians are probably frightened to do so. They must be aware that the answers would be shocking and quite unacceptable to them.

Less squeamish, Digby Anderson in the Times recently had the temerity to advo- cate corporal punishment, beatings or elec- tric shocks, 'to fill the gap between the severe punishment of prison and the non- Punishment of probation'. He was quoting from a book by Professor Graeme New- man, Just and Painful: a case for the Corporal punishment to criminals (Macmil- lan, £15.50). I fancy the poor of Merseyside would be far less shocked by Mr Anderson's modest proposal than prog- ressive criminologists must be. An 'enlight- ened' Times reader accused him of advo- cating 'a cruel and disgusting practice'. The reader wrote from Prince of Wales Road, NW5. He may never have been mugged there; he may never have gone to prison.

Those who have been to prison might be more sympathetic to Mr Anderson's plea that prison is itself a brutal form of corporal as well as mental punishment, a form of torture, though peculiarly random, capricious, long-sustained and unjust: many of its cruel effects are not intended, but arise from the grim chances of prison life. The prisoner's body is punished by prison violence, neglect, foul food, over- crowding, restriction and institutionalisa- tion. His family is punished too. So is the taxpayer, forced to maintain in rotting idleness ever more criminals in ever more crowded jails. For all these reasons Mr Anderson and the professor urge that prison should be reserved for serious fre- quent offenders alone.

Is corporal punishment inhumane? Tol- stoy is not commonly thought inhumane. Another Times reader cited him this: better to flog a man and send him on his way, with his debt discharged, than to keep him for years mouldering in prison.

The discharge of debt is an essential part of punishment. This is why Hegel speaks of the criminal's 'right to punishment'. Punishment is designed to protect not only society but the criminal himself and his family. As Patricia Morgan argued in a typically thoughtful and percipient article in the Daily Telegraph, it is designed to protect him from vengeance, lynch and mob law, from private retaliation and the temptation to counter-retaliate. Punish- ment is intended to save the criminal from what happened to a man privately judged 'Another fine MOSS you've got me out of!' responsible for a robbery, who, according to Miss Morgan, was punched, kicked, struck with an axe, burned with heated knives, battered with a pool cue and drenched with boiling water. His two assailants had picked the wrong man, and were jailed for three years and 21 months. Are such sentences adequate to express the anger of the victim, his friends and society, and to avert the possibility of vengeance? I doubt it.

Prison sentences get shorter and shorter, partly because judges are keen or pressed not to add unduly to jail over-crowding. But there is also the modest desire less to punish the criminal than to reform, reha- bilitate, 'treat' or 'help' him, and the growing realisation that prison, though it punishes, achieves none of its loftier pur- poses. Crime is increasingly viewed as the product not of the criminal but of 'society', which is of course as absurd as to credit 'society' with Beethoven's symphonies. Society should therefore logically be punished, and so in a perverse and wild manner it is, if a disproportionate number of poor old women mugged and robbed can be properly held to represent society.

As Patricial Morgan suggests, criminal law is less and less concerned to do justice, which is what it's for. Instead it runs housing projects, employment schemes and 'psycho-drama', courses on motor- bike maintenance, coffee-houses and en- counter therapy. In no way do such antics embody or assuage or sublimate society's anger and hatred for thugs and burglars.

Miss Morgan says clearly that punish- ment must be certain and must exceed the advantage of crime. Yet even she shrinks from saying what the punishment should be. Would she advocate corporal punish- ment? I can't speak for her, though I can't think where else she could go. For myself, I advocate nothing (I've never been mug- ged — touch wood), except that public opinion should be belatedly consulted.

Why don't Merseyside's precious left-wing MPs try to find out for a change what their constituents want? Why doesn't Mr Kauf- man put his ear to the ground in Gorton? If he holds evening meetings or surgeries there, is he sure that all dare come?

A progressive New York judge was mugged. When he next appeared on the bench, he explained that his misfortune would have no effect on his lenient and enlightened sentencing policy. A voice yelled from the court, 'Mug him again!' Verb. sap!