Jim's in-tray
CRIME GILES PLAYFAIR
What sort of commander-in-chief will Mr James Callaghan make in the `battle against crime'? Or, rather, how will he wish to be re- garded in this role by Parliament and the electorate? The distinction is a necessary one to make, for the influence that any Home Secretary can or does actually exert as a penal administrator tends to be wildly over-estimated. Penal policy, unlike, say, fiscal policy, has sup- posedly more to do, with long-term objectives than immediate needs. It would be impractical to switch its direction whenever there .was a change of government. It would be ludicrous to do so every time a Prime Minister finds •it convenient to shunt an unwanted Chancellor into the Home Office.
Penology, moreover, is a highly, specialised subject. A newly appointed Home Secretary rarely has any knowledge of it. Nor is his atti- tude towards the problem of crime and punish- ment (assuming that he has one) usually derived from serious thought or study. There has been one outstanding exception to this rule during the past half century—Sir Samuel Hoare, a descendant of Elizabeth Fry and a lifelong member of the Howard. League. But even Hoare's record. as a 'great reforming' Home Secretary was a matter more of image than reality. Legislators on both sides of the House predicted that the Criminal Justice Bill, which he introduced in 1938 and which, with a few modifications, was eventually enacted under a Labour government ten years later, would be a `monument' to him. But today it is a monument to Sir Alexander Paterson, the reforming Prison Commissioner, if it is a monument to anybody. For it is now known to have been, almost ex- clusively, Paterson's work: an embodiment of his ideas and aspirations.
Successive Home Secretaries have accepted the fact of a progressive penal policy as something fixed and settled, and it seems most unlikely that Mr Callaghan will be any more willing or able to challenge this status quo than his pre- decessors were. His Image,' however, is another matter. It will be fashioned out of the extent of his inclination, or ability, to have ready- made progressive ideas translated into progres- sive action.
Mr Roy Jenkins sought a liberal image, and it is fair to say that if he had not done so, long- considered advances, such as the abolition of flogging and the introduction of a parole sys- tem, might have been further delayed. But despite his extraordinary success in establishing a reputation for himself • as a great penal re- former, especially among the more unthinking of his left-wing admirers, the cold truth is that he has possibly been the only Home Secretary since the beginning of the century to leave our prisons worse and more repressive places, on balance, than they were when he found them.
This is the consequence of the rushed in- vestigation of prison security, which Mr Jenkins ordered at the end of last year and which pro- vided him with a smokescreen after George Blake's escape, and Tory demands for an in- quiry into it, threatened him with political embarrassment. It is hard to see what other vital purpose the Mountbatten Report served. Considering that there had been nothing like a sudden or unexpected increase in escapes, and
the great majority of them (as it has since been admitted) habitually ended in swift recapture,
the report was clearly based on an exaggerated
and misleading conception of the size and urgency of the problem. At the same, time, its
recommendations, coming from someone with- out any previous experience of prison admini- stration, were bound to be too hastily made.
Nevertheless, Mr Jenkins, having asked for the report, was stuck with it. The sequel has been a reversal, in various ways, of the process of liberalising prison conditions in the interests of a reformative policy. Patrolling police dogs, for instance, at Wormwood Scrubs (a first offenders' prison) are a curious sort of contribu- tion towards maintaining the. `self-respect' of the inmates. And Dr W. S. Gray, Medical Superintendent of the psychiatric prison at Grendon Underwood, has publicly complained of the anti-therapeutic and needlessly provoca- tive effect of floodlighting the walls. In short, if Mr Callaghan also seeks a liberal image—and, as a Labour Home Secretary, can he really want anything else?—he has been left an unenviable inheritance. If he agrees to relax the Mountbatten security measures, and this is followed by a new rise in the escape rate, he will risk being mercilessly shot at by the press and in Parliament. On the other hand, -he will need money to give a convincing impression that the system is none the less • progressing, rather than retrogressing; and this may not be readily forthcoming from Mr Jenkins in his new position as the country's Iron Chancellor. Should the parole scheme fail, as it almost certainly will if it is parsimoniously run, Mr Callaghan will be held responsible. If (and the possibility of this is now rumoured) plans for building the supra-security prison on the Isle of Wight are halted or postponed, Mr Callaghan will have to take the blime when -it becomes apparent that the train robbers and other allegedly dangerous prisoners are being held indefinitely 'under conditions'—to quote Lord Mountbatten—`such as no country with a- record o civilised behaviour ought to tolerate any longer than is absolutely neccessary as a. stop- gap measure.'
Political considerations created the dilemma in which Mr Callaghan. is put. Political con- siderations, basically, may bar his escape from it. In these circumstances, one begins to wonder whether -the fiction of the Home Secretary as an all-powerful, all-knowing, all-responsible -prison administrator is worth preserving. Mightn't it be better, since there is no funda- mental dispute about policy, to remove the con- duct of penal affairs from party government control, and entrust it to some public body, modelled on the United States Federal Bureau of Prisons, for which the Home Secretary would be answerable in Parliament in the same sense that the Postmaster-General is answerable for broadcasting?
We were nearer to this idea before the Prison Commission was abolished and absorbed in the Home Office. Lord Mountbatten evidently favoured a step back to it with the proposal in his report for a professional head of the service `who should become a figure known to the general public.' But if this was one of the re- port's exceptionally helpful recommendations, Mr Jenkins muffed it. Though he duly appointed a professional head.of the service—one who was innocent of any preconceived ideas about penal policy and experience of penal practice—how many, among the general public, have yet heard of his appointee? One suspects that Very few will ever be able to name him.
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