Crime and reparation
Peter Paterson
The official blessing of the Home Secretary was given last week to those reformers who believe, within reasonable limits, that society might benefit from the old idea of the criminal returning to the scene of the crime. To a predictable roar of protest from the 'law and order brigade', raucously led by the Sun newspaper, the no- tion of reparation by the wrongdoer to the victim as an alternative to incarceration is now to be tried on a wider scale.
What Mr Leon Brittan seems to have in mind is an extension of the existing, highly successful Community Service Order scheme, under which offenders put in a stipulated number of hours of useful work instead of going to prison. But seeping over from the United Stases is the belief that criminals should be made directly to face the consequences of their own actions by making personal amends, and experiments in this direction are already under way in different parts of the country.
So far, however, face-to-face confronta- tion between offenders and victims, beyond the dock and the witness box, remains an exception, and is almost always confined to juvenile criminals. To implement it on a wider scale, and with adults, may clash with the right to a fair hearing in court for the offender, and the inevitable delay between the offence and conviction could deprive such encounters of much reality. There are also the feelings of the victims to be taken into account: for perfectly understandable reasons they may not be much interested in meeting the person who burgled their home, vandalised their shop or mugged them in the street. In any case, victims are not always individuals — institutions such as churches or offices are too impersonal for such techniques to have much meaning.
From my own observations, offenders themselves do not always respond positively
to the chance of meeting their victims. I asked one man an a Community Service order how he would react if asked to meet and apologise to the person he was con- victed of beating up. 'I'd probably hit him again,' he replied.
So, at the moment, most reparation schemes adopt a stand-off approach: they are, as they must be, voluntary, and involve convicted offenders already paying their debt to society through the Community Ser- vice scheme being asked to help the victims of other — Perhaps uncaptured wrongdoers. Typical of this approach is the scheme run in Warwickshire by senior pro- bation officer Michael Varah — son of Chad Varah, the founder of the Samaritans.
As a first step towards bringing home to offenders the material and psychological consequences of their actions upon those at the receiving end, he established a link with the local Victim Support Scheme, a volun- tary movement now expanding all over the country. Its branches provide a service for the victims of crimes, assisting with com- pensation claims, sorting out insurance and legal problems, and generally helping peo- ple to cope with the shock of suddenly fin- ding themselves part of the crime statistics.
Mr Varah, an ex-international runner and once a master at Rugby School, is most concerned with old, poor and uninsured victims of crime — largely burglaries who have no one to turn to for the im- mediate repair of damage done in a break- in. Under his scheme, the police contact the Victim Support people, who establish whether help is needed, whether it is wanted, and, if it is, whether there is any objection to it coming from offenders serv- ing their time on Community Service.
With a grant of a few hundred pounds from the local branch of the computer firm, IBM, Mr Varah has built up a stock of timber, glass, putty, window catches and other materials for immediate repairs. The offenders under his charge are not obliged to carry out the work, though refusals are unknown, and they always remain strictly under supervision.
I accompanied Mr Varah and Simon, an 18-year-old on Community Service for breaking into a council depot and smashing up several vehicles — 'I enjoyed playing bumper cars with them' — to the home of an elderly lady in Leamington. Someone had broken a window to climb into her council house the night before, while she was out, torn the gas meter from the wall, stolen its contents and then dumped the empty meter in the garden. I asked her if she was worried that her window was being repaired by someone who had already been convicted of a crime. Might he not take the chance to case the joint in readiness for a later ill-intentioned visit of his own? 'He seems a nice enough chap,' she said. `I don't mind so long as someone mends the window. I can't afford to, so I'm grateful: Simon, a cheerful lad, said he preferred this kind of work. 'It's only right,' he said.
Later, I met two more offenders on Com- munity Service: Jim, 24, sentenced to 150 hours for assault, and Mick, who is 18, ser- ving 160 hours for social security fraud. They had spent several days painting the of- fices of a charity, which, it so happened, had been burgled the night before. 'We're obviously the prime suspects,' said Mick ruefully. In fact, such is the risk of being caught and sent straight to prison (the vir- tually automatic penalty for a breach of an order) that crimes against people employing Community Service workers are rare. Simon was brought in by Mr Varah to mend the window broken by the intruders since Jim and Mick already had another problem: they had painted over the office safe, set in a wall, and no one could get it open. Both, as they got on with legal safe- cracking, agreed that Community Service had more meaning if the work was concern- ed directly with helping people.
So, -Michael Varah's scheme in War- wickshire, and others like it, confront of- fenders with victims — though not, so far, the original offender and his particular vic- tim. Nevertheless, the general consequences of crime are usefully personalised — 'Was the old lady whose home I burgled reallY very different to this old lady whose win- dow I'm mending?' — and the offender is making reparation to an individual rather than to society at large. Varah believes that Community Service is the biggest step for- ward in penology for a century. 'It insists on offenders putting something back into the community, and it keeps people out of prison. £40 million spent on expanding and developing Community Service would do more to combat crime than spending it on new prisons,' he says. Mr Brittan has already committed his £40 million for new prison building. How much will he have left over for an alternative designed to make prison unnecessary?
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