CRIME MARCHES ON
By E. C. HODGKIN The ordinary reader of the newspaper is uneasily aware of what is presented to him as a " crime wave." The burglar lurks in his garden after dark ; the stranger propping up the bar in his local is undoubtedly a black-market tout ; if any member of his family ever had a mink coat or a bottle of whisky it would, he does not doubt, vanish overnight ; from time to time he is even anxious for the safety of his children. If he bothered to burrow into the official figures published by the Home Office he would find some indication of how far his fears are justified and how far they are not. The latest year for which criminal statistics are available is 1945. In that year the number of men and women of all ages found guilty of indict- able offences was 116,000 ; in 1938 the total was 78,000. This is an increase of nearly 5o per cent. The figures for non-indictable offences (excluding traffic offences, which, of course, have gone down considerably) show a decrease from 234,00o convictions in 1938 to 149,00o in 1945, most of which is due to a steep decline (largely financial in origin, it is to be presumed) in drunkenness and dis- orderly behaviour.
However, it is the indictable offencesawhich matter, and the most alarming aspect of these is the way in which they have spread among young people. The number of boys under fourteen found guilty in 1938 was 15,000 ; in 1945 it was 23,000. For boys between the ages of fourteen and seventeen the figures were 12,000 and 17,000, and for youths from seventeen to twenty-one zo,000 and 15,000. Figures for girls show an even more rapid -rise during the war, but by 1945 they were already beginning to drop appreciably, whereas those for boys were not. As might be expected, the crimes which are responsible for most of the increase are those connected with
thieving ; " breaking and entering " is twice as common among youths under twenty-one as it was before the war and larceny has increased by about a third. Crimes of violence for this age'have also doubled.
Juveniles form the largest class of offenders, but crime among adults is proportionately greater than it was before the war. Among
men aged from twenty-one to thirty convictions have gone up by 26 per cent. and among those over thirty by 36 per cent. As it is these older groups that most often find their way into prison, the
result of this rise has been to swell gaol populations. As far as the
total figures for "receptions" at all gaols go, there has been no increase over pre-war figures ; in fact, there has been a slight drop
from 30,600 to 29,100. But in the last pre-war year, 1938, more than half the prison sentences were for a period of one month or less, whereas now only a quarter of the sentences are for such very short periods. Longer sentences are being given more frequently by judges and magistrates, not because they have listened to argu- ments in favour of long sentences as reformative measures, but because more of the crimes which come before them are of a serious nature on which a long prison sentence follows almost automatically. This means that the prisons are being clogged up, not by the floating army of drunks and petty thieves who wander in and out through their gates for sojourns of a few days or weeks, but by young men who are behind the bars for a year or more. Prison staffs are short,• although recruiting for them is improving slightly. Many of the prison buildings are overdue for demolition, and few are suitable for their present purposes. The Prison Commissioners are being forced to meet an expanding problem with static or diminishing resources.
If the general increase:in crime could be written off as just a hang- over from the war, which will cure itself in time as all hangovers do, there would be no especial need for anxiety about the future. Unfortunately, this is not the case. Lawbreaking, particularly when contracted young, is liable to become a habit. There is good evidence that many of the young men who come into court today were the juvenile offenders of the war years, and that unless some unexpected change of behaviour occurs they will go on until they die, swelling the criminal totals for their age-groups. The war created a sort of bulge of crime, and it is moving up, growing older. It is also being reinforced by a steady flow of youthful recruits bred from post-war unsettlement. Unless we are going to reconcile ourselves to the present high rate of crime, we have got to prevent lawbreaking from- becoming a habit. The courts have a wide variety of powers at their command for the punishment and reform of offenders, and when the Criminal Justice Bill becomes law the variety will be even wider. But even now the courts do not make the best use of their powers. There is no need to follow into its details the criticism which can justly be made of court sentences, particularly since it has been admirably set out in a recent book by Mr. Leo Page (The Sentence of the Court, Faber, los. 6d.). Yet a few examples should be enough to make us wonder whether a good deal of the present trouble is not of our own devising.
On two points of criticism—the use of imprisonment as a punish- ment for adolescents and the multiplication of short sentences—the most authoritative voice is that of the Prison Commissioners ; and the following quotations are taken from their report for 1946: " It can only be deplored that it was thought necessary to sentence no less than 1,277 youths under twenty-one to terms of imprisonment for their first proved offence, and the Commissioners cannot but feel that among over t,too young men with more than two convictions who were sent to prison, there must have been a substantial number for whom Borstal training would have been more appropriate." The explanation behind the later figure may be the old myth, which is cherished by Judges and. Recorders as well as Magistrates, that a year in prison is more-to be dreaded than three years at a Borstal institution, whereas the exact opposite is the case. And on short sentences: " Out of the 3,390 sentences of imprisonment (on youths under twenty-one), 2,297 were of not more than three months. In view of the fact, among others, that some 1,5oo of these youths had already been convicted more than once, it is difficult to understand the intention of these very short sentences."
Magistrates appear to be increasingly fond of fining young offenders
instead of putting them on probation. Of juveniles convicted in 1938, 51 per cent. were put on probation and 8 per cent. fined, whereas in 1945 the proportions had changed to 42 per cent. and 17 per cent.' It would not matter so much if these fines were at all of the nature of restitution for damage done. As, it is, they are cash paid to an indifferent State; restitution is still a strangely neglected punishment. Of course, there are good and bad courts, and even in " bad " courts faulty sentences are only a small fraction of the whole. But there are more than a thousand courts of summary jurisdiction in England and Wales, and it only needs a few mistakes from some of them in the course of a_year to tot up a formidable list of mishandled oppor- tunities against the account of the community.
One tendency which the courts have to take into account, and for which they cannot be held responsible, is the apparently diminished sense of shame which the threat of prison or the publicity of the courts conjures up even among law-abiding citizens. This cannot be accounted for by any humanisation which prison discipline may have undergone in the past fifty years, but is part of the wider
Pisease of irresponsibility, for which many origins can be given. lainly, the easier it is to break the law unconsciously, the less compunction there will be in breaking it consciously. And the "crime wave" with which courts, police and citizens have to contend is a conscious and deliberate defiance of the law.
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