Courts and police
lain Scarlet
The English Sentencing System Sir Rupert Cross (Butterworths £6.40 casebound, £5.00 limp cover) Police Powers in England and Wales L. H. Leigh (Butterworths £5.60) Many regular Spectator readers will probably have guessed by now that I don't go much on academics (mainly because_they're inclined to talk and write exclusively for one another's benefit and in a lingo that the rest of us — who actually maintain them in the luxury of their ivory towers — cannot hope to understand); and that I view the English sentencing system in exactly the same way as the visiting Eskimo viewed the giraffe: there ain't no such animal. Thus the prospect of having to read and review a book by one of the former about the latter — which I don't believe exists anyway — frankly appalled me. So let it be said immediately that Sir Rupert Cross is the exception to the academic rule; and that reading his book has convinced me that, with a little help from our judges and magistrates, we could very soon develop a sentencing system which not only served the ends of justice tempered with mercy, but which would also make a positive contribution to reducing our prison population (currently approaching 40,000 and costing £8 per head per day). For in this comparatively slim and, thank God, easy-to-read volume he not only catalogues all the various alternatives open to our sentencers, but explains what each entails, and discusses when and how it might best be applied in an ideal world. Indeed, he goes further and questions the whole philosophy of sentencing, wonders whether the system is too retributive and discusses very
seriously (which is more than most of our judges are prepared to do) the question of whether or not 'drastic reforms in our sentencing system' are called for. . .
Now none of this is to suggest that this book is by a reforming zealot. By far the best thing about it is that the author discusses things, putting arguments for and against each concept with equal vigour, and offering clues as to his own opinions only to those who are prepared to search for them by reading between the lines.
To that extent, I suppose, the book is academic. But it is not, repeat not, directed only at other academics. Sir Rupert has gone for a wider audience and he deserves to get it. Certainly it should be required reading for every judge and magistrate. The pity of it is that it won't be. Recent research showed that 60 per cent of our magistrates hadn't read a book relevant to their duties in the past two years. Judging by some of the antics they get up to in our higher courts, the same could probably be said of their senior, professional brethren.
However, if the other 40 per cent could be persuaded to open it at page one they will have been so amply rewarded by page forty that they will undoubtedly carry on through to the end.
1 wish I could say the same for Dr Leigh's treatise on police powers in England and Wales. But no such luck. Dr Leigh is a lawyer and in that incestuous way lawyers have, he has written only for other lawyers.
This, again, is a pity. For now
that we have a government that seems determined to make up in diktat for what it cannot achieve with retrospective legislation, we are nearer than ever to becoming a police state. And that being so it would be jolly nice if some kind English-as-it-is-spoke writer could produce a book for the poor bloody public, the governed hoi po/loi, which clearly defined the powers of the police in relation to our day-to-day activities.
That the learned Dr Leigh never set out to write such a book 1 fully accept. But after wading through what he has produced — and obtaining, for my pains, quite a lot of useful information — I cannot help feeling that he'd be in line for a knighthood and his publishers for a thwacking great profit if, between them, they authorised and published a translation into the kind of English understood beyond the lunatic fringes of the London School of Economics.
Which brings me to a final point. Both these books are expensive. To my mind, far too expensive. And while I'm sure that lawyers, who love to be surrounded by books and the more esoteric their content the better, will happily pay for Dr Leigh's opus out of their fat fees, I'm not sure that the magistrates (60 per cent of whom appear to have an in-built resistance to keeping their learning up to date), and the judges (who simply 'cannot hear' anything which doesn't emanate from a wig-and-gown merchant), will bother to afford solicitor Sir Rupert's splendid effort.
Which, again, is a pity.
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