ANOTHER VOICE
Towards a penal system attuned to our national character
AUBERON WAUGH
In a fortnight when 'Howard gets tough' headlines have been jostling with 'Major confirms economic recovery' to kill the newspaper industry and turn my poor wife out on the streets, surprisingly few queries have greeted Michael Howard's suggestion that judges should take victims' suffering into account when sentencing.
The remark — one can scarcely call it an edict, since the Home Secretary has no control of the judiciary — was prompted by representations from the pressure group Justice for Victims. Since it was accompa- nied by the sensible suggestion that victims and their families should be better informed during court proceedings — even have seats allocated to them in the public gallery during trials — people may have passed over the first remark, assuming it to be another more or less meaningless politi- cal sound-bite. That is how the newspapers took it. Howard says we should think more about the victims of crime than about the criminals, we read, echoing the deeply held conclusion of every saloon-bar bore and drunk in the country. But the idea that sen- tences should be determined by the amount the victims or the victims' relations have suffered opens an entirely new perspective.
Justice for Victims points out that victims of violent crime or their close relations often find it impossible to return to work for many months. So, in some cases, no doubt, do quite distant relations, friends or even mere acquaintances of the victim. Is this to be added to the sentence, or to the compensation paid out by the State to sur- viving victims, their relations, friends or acquaintances and any interested third par- ties who put in a claim?
It is an easily observable fact that differ- ent people suffer differently from the same degree of injury. When I walk down a train to and from the buffet, I sometimes acci- dentally kick the feet of fellow passengers sprawling out of their chairs. Some, in acknowledgment of my apology, smile bravely and say it doesn't matter at all. Others tend to treat the apology as an admission of guilt and further insult, scowl- ing, grimacing and muttering to themselves for the rest of the journey, with threatening glances at the end of it. The first group, I like to think, includes most of the middle class, most foreigners, West Country folk and possibly those with a Services back- ground. The second group includes nearly everyone else. Someone explained to me once that the lot of the 'workers' in Britain is so dreadful that you cannot reasonably expect them to accept the concept of mis- fortune with gentlemanly resignation, like so many old-fashioned Lloyd's names. Any misfortune is seen as an attack, calling for revenge and satisfaction. This may once have been true, but I observe that with increasing prosperity their rage at any mis- fortune has become greater, their vindic- tiveness more extreme.
Perhaps the difference between degrees of suffering is explained geographically, as much as by economic condition. A friend recently crashed head on with another car in the Somerset lanes. The other car was driven by people from Essex. No one was badly hurt, but as she ran a mile and a half in some pain to get help, having asked them how they were, they remained moan- ing and muttering to themselves. My friend's insurer said, `I know their sort. They will be claiming for six months off work and mental suffering.'
It would be absurd to pretend that either this avarice or this vindictiveness is peculiar to Britain, although I would maintain that what has been called our own dependency and complaints (or whingeing) culture may yet produce a few refinements. In the Unit- ed States it is quite normal for relatives of a murder victim to be given ring-side seats at the execution, while civil litigation is an enormous part of their culture, effectively taking the place of a welfare state, and cre- ating a comparable drag on economic efficiency.
What is peculiarly British is not the vin- dictiveness nor the avarice of the workers, but their whingeing self-righteousness; not the inability of the middle or administrative classes to control these unhealthy urges in the lower orders but the sadistic delight with which they indulge them. Any cry from the public bar for even more ferocious pun- ishments is always met with a supporting cheer from the saloon bar. The sadistic penal-mindedness of large sections of the middle class, which give them so much in common with members of the working class whom they send to prison, does not derive so much from insecurity in their privileged position, I feel, as from simple hatred of their social inferiors.
Even more remarkable are cases where the criminal himself asks for more fero- cious punishment. Last week's newspapers showed the poignant photographs of an unnamed mother whose nine-year-old daughter had been abducted and raped. She had written to the Prime Minister and every MP demanding that the offender's nine-year sentence should be increased. In this she was warmly supported by the press and also by Mark Holmes, the abductor and sexual assailant concerned. It must all go to make the tiny band of liberal, humane, well-educated middle-class penal reformers in the Howard League, for instance, feel rather lonely.
I hate to raise the point that it will cost rather a lot of money to keep Mark Holmes in prison for an extra five or six years, but money may well be the argument that wins the day. Once when I expressed disgust at the idea that parents should be able to col- lect money in compensation for dead chil- dren (as at Hillsborough) my American niece expressed shock. 'Don't you put any value on a life?' she asked.
The answer is surely no, a life has no commercial value, unless the deceased had dependants. Derek Rogers may be furious at receiving only £7,500 from the Criminal Injuries Compensation Board in compensa- tion for the death of his daughter, but I don't see why he should receive a penny, and feel he would be in a stronger position in his campaign of revenge against the killer, Scott Singleton, if he had refused it.
When the principle of government com- pensation for criminal injuries was intro- duced in 1964, I was mildly appalled by this further shouldering of responsibility by the State. The justification was that for someone to suffer a criminal injury marked a failure of the State's responsibility to police the country, but this was obviously absurd, since policing would have to be infinite to prevent all criminal behaviour. It never occurred to me then that criminal injury compensation might offer a much cheaper alternative both to policing and to the penal system. It is a question of balancing the victim's avarice against his vindictiveness.
Remove the police, remove the prisons, remove all physical protection from crimi- nals, let courts decide only whether an injury was received as the result of a crimi- nal act (making it liable for state compen- sation) or in just reprisal for a criminal act (where no compensation is payable), and we will not only have saved the State many billions of pounds, but we will at last have a system of law enforcement attuned to our national character.
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