STALINIST STATISTICS
The government insists that the reconviction rate among young offenders is falling. But
that's not true, says Theodore Dahymple
THERE is nothing a professional pessimist hates more than good news: it disheartens him so. There is a great deal of comfort to be derived from the idea that the world is going to the demnition bowwows, which is completely spoiled by counter-evidence of improvement. The human mind avoids nuance at all costs.
Last week, the Home Office produced statistics purporting to demonstrate, and reported in our press and on the radio as demonstrating, that the reconviction rate of juvenile offenders declined by 22 per cent between 1997 and 2000: thanks, so the corollary went, to the wise policies of the government. All my prophecies of doom, it seemed, were set at naught, and my impression that the little bastards of England, both literal and metaphorical, were just as horrible as ever, if not more so, was nothing but the bitter misapprehension of a prejudiced mind. I found it all most upsetting.
I needn't have worried, of course. All government statistics that demonstrate that, in the words of the late Joseph Stalin. life has become better, life has become merrier, are open to other interpretations. And so it proved with the Home Office's paper allegedly demonstrating the decline of youth recidivism, entitled 'One year juvenile reconviction rates: first quarter of 2001 cohort'. It came complete with the Home Office's new mission statement: Building a Safe, Just and Tolerant Society. Would any sensible person trust the statistics published by an organisation with a mission statement like that? It is truly amazing how much suppressio yen i and suggestio faisi you can pack into a mere seven words.
The paper on juvenile reconviction was of immense complexity, enough to make the head spin. It begins with the immortal words: The Home Office's success in its fight against crime will be judged on outcomes, which have been defined in agreement with the Treasury.' (At this point, I thought of the poem by Ernesto Cardenal, 'Somoza Unveils the Statue of Somoza in the Somoza Stadium'.) The rest of the paper is dedicated to the vitally important task of ensuring that no citizen can pass reasonable judgment on the Home Office's success or otherwise. But statistical sleights of hand suggest that all is not quite open and above board. First, young people who have been sentenced to imprisonment are specifically excluded from the statistical tables. Not only do these people — about 5 per cent of the total — commit the most serious offences, but they are by far the most likely to reoffend. It is claimed that this omission was for speed of analysis, but one suspects that it was for convenience of conclusion. The reduction in reconviction rates would have been smaller had they been concluded.
Even more important, there has been a large rise in the percentage of young people receiving warnings and reprimands, the least serious of possible sanctions against juvenile lawbreakers. Indeed, 76 per cent of the juvenile offenders fell into this category in the cohort studied. If these police sanctions are given to young children for ever more trivial offences or misdemeanours (in the police's eternal struggle to manipulate figures to demonstrate their effectiveness to their even more crooked political masters), it is hardly surprising that overall reconviction rates should decline.
The figures appear to show that the milder the punishment — if a warning or reprimand can be called a punishment at all — the lower the chances of reconviction. If this correlation were truly causative in nature — that is to say, if the mildest verbal chastisement really had a greater deterrent effect upon future offending than harsher punishments — we should not only have to overturn all we thought we knew about human psychology, but it would suggest that the best deterrent of all to future offending would be to do nothing whatever about it. If only 13 per cent of those given reprimands reoffend. while 63 per cent of those given community punishments do so, we should be actively searching for punishments even milder than reprimands.
When you look at the youths who receive more serious sanctions for more serious crimes, the picture is not at all rosy. Recidivism rates run at approximately two thirds, and have not declined at all, not in the slightest; in some cases, they have actually risen. According to the logic of the paper, the more serious the crime, the less condign should the punishment be. Only then could we hope for a reduction in recidivism among the most serious criminals.
This is an illustration of a general law with regard to the public service: the central setting of targets results only in statistical obfuscation and the constant moving of goalposts, until the statistical equivalent of sea-sickness sets in. Far from allowing progress (or lack of it) to be easily measured, target-setting in bureaucratic systems is the means by which the general public can be, and often is, deprived of faith in its own judgment.
Suppose you live in a high-crime area, where life is a torment because of the conduct of predominantly young criminals. I need hardly mention that there are many such areas in Britain today. You can't leave your house at night, your car windows are smashed regularly, and when you do leave your house it is without any confidence that your goods will still be there when you return. As far as you are concerned, nothing has changed for the better in the recent past.
Then you hear that government statistics prove that youth recidivism is in sharp decline. They are trumpeted triumphantly: at last, citizens, life is better, life is merrier. Nothing in your experience leads you to believe these statistics, but on the other hand you are not in a position to contradict them. Even in the unlikely event that you saw the publication in which they appeared, it would be impossible for you to decide what they really meant. In the process, your own experience will have been devalued, to have been replaced in your mind by no real broader knowledge either. You are left in a kind of cognitive limbo, told one thing and experiencing another: you have now become the perfect passive citizen of a clientelistic state.
It is not only with regard to juvenile crime that the citizen is deprived by complex statistics of any means of forming a judgment on important social trends. Are educational standards rising or falling? The goalposts have been moved so many times, and the different methods of assessing educational attainment are by now so incommensurate, that it has been rendered impossible for anyone to say — at least on the basis of official information — what is happening. The average person just gives up. He trusts neither what he is told, nor what he gleans from his own experience. He stops thinking about it.
The availability of information is, of course, essential to the functioning of a democracy. But the dissemination of pseudo-information is equally vital to the running of a dictatorship.
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