Another voice
Crime and punishment, contd
Auberon Waugh
Rereading my essay of last week, written under the influence of a high fever, I seem to spot an element of confusion not to say intellectual dishonesty in the argument at one point. A few readers may remember how, with what still seems impeccable logic, I had deduced from the incoherence of the left-wing platform and the threatening demeanour of a black 'spokesman' or 'leader' on television that one of the problems of our society was the unusually high number of frustrated power maniacs or would-be Hitlers inside it. In discussing the various ways of dealing with them, I suggested that they might be discouraged from their activities if they were taken into a quiet corner from time to time and bounced up and down. A few weeks of solitary confinement, being bounced up and down for half an hour every day alone in some adaptation of a fairground Big Wheel, might well convince them that there are more ejoyable hobbies than undermining society for the eventual enjoyment of supreme power; that there is a certain amount of harmless pleasure to be derived from breeding silk worms or budgerigars or making 'wine' from elderberries and dandelions and turnips in season.
With temperature and pulse back to normal after a short spell under the surgeon's knife, I still feel there is something to be said for this proposal, although one would need to find some more elegant way of describing it than 'punishment'. Essentially, of course, what we are discussing is a programme of social reorientation, like the Soviet use of psychiatric hospitals for those unable to appreciate the benefits of the socialist system. The whole subject of penology is profoundly objectionable and should not be discussed by civilised people, but I think my own proposal for bouncing people up and down is preferable to the Soviet practice, of filling them with drugs and convincing them they are poached eggs, because it does not interfere with their free. will. The confusion — or possible dishonesty — in my original argument came where I tried to explain how the process of being bounced up and down might discourage people from their anti-social activities.
The idea is not to inflict pain, so much as discomfort and humiliation,' I wrote. That was at best only part of the truth. The real purpose of any effective deterrent is to inspire dread. It is the almost total absence from our penal system of any element of dread — or, if you prefer it, terror — which may be at the root of the impending collapse of social discipline. For the last two weeks we have been reading accounts of the Deptford inquest on 13 young blacks who burned to death at an all-night party in New Cross Road. Its purpose was to establish how they died — a reasonable enough subject of inquiry, one would have thought. Witness after witness — almost all of them black teenagers — has insulted the court, taunted the coroner, even, on one occasion, threatened to thump counsel, cheerfully owning up to having lied in police statements, contradicting himself and lying again and again or refusing to answer questions with impunity, to cheers and laughter from relatives of the deceased in the back of the court. The coroner, who has authority to commit witnesses to prison for contempt of court, as well as to clear the court, has dared to do neither (at any rate at the time of writing) for fear, no doubt, of impugning his impartiality.
But the result has been that the hearing was a shambles. One inference — although certainly not the one intended — from the conduct of the witnesses and members of the public on this occasion might be that they did not regard the deaths of 13 black teenagers as of sufficient importance to merit the disciplines of a serious inquiry. If they prefer to use the occasion for a political demonstration, or demonstration of ethnic solidarity, that is their choice. Certainly, no white teenager giving evidence at a similar in quiry would have got away with the same behaviour. Perhaps, indeed, there is something to be said'for looking on the bright side, for smiling and whistling on all occasions, as I promised to do when I became a boy scout nearly 30 years ago. But the very smallest inference to be drawn from the New Cross Massacre Horror Burlesque is that the majesty of the law no longer inspires dread, let alone terror, in the black teenagers of Deptford.
Does it inspire dread in anybody else? One's attitude to the matter is bound to be a trifle ambivalent, since neither dread nor terror is, generally speaking, something which makes for happiness, and my own experience of the law does not lead me to hold it in the greatest respect. Between the risks of idle or incompetent lawyers, stupid or wrong-headed judges and a moronic or perverse jury, it seems to me that nobody who finds himself in court has better than an even chance of obtaining justice. Perhaps there is an element of jealousy in the confused feelings with which we read that Mr Robert McKenzie, the well-known black teenager, threatened Mr Michael Corkery QC, counsel for the police, that he would thump him if Mr Corkery persisted in asking how Mr McKenzie's mother was employed. At very least, I feel there is an awareness that these black teenagers are ahead of the field in realising that the law no longer holds any terrors for those prepared to defy it, that the elaborate respect we traditionally show to any overpaid buffoon in wig and gown is deference paid to nothing more substantial than a shadow.
My own experience of punishment — I once held the record at Downside for having been beaten 14 times in one term, although I never acquired a taste for it, as people are supposed to do — confirms that its worst elements are anticipation, and uncertainty, both of which add up to the magic ingredient of dread. Obviously a society ruled by dread is an unhealthy and miserable society, but I suspect that a society from which every element of dread has been removed is also a society in danger of disintegration; and the terrors of anarchy are in no way preferable to the dread which, as I believe, lies behind any degree of social discipline. We are used to hearing that it is unsafe for old ladies to walk in Brixton after dark, but it brings it closer, at any rate to me, to learn that it is no longer safe for young men to walk in Taunton High Street in broad daylight. In the past two months, in three separate incidents, two members of my household and four of their acquaintances have been beaten up within 20 yards of Taunton High Street by a gang of thugs who wander the area unmolested.
It may be of no more than symbolic interest that 100 Labour MPs should abandon rational debate in the House of Commons in order to demonstrate and shout slogans outside the Department of Employment; or that Monsignor Derek Worlock, the Roman Catholic archbishop of Liverpool and a candidate for bouncing if ever there was one, should give his blessing to the Socialist Workers' Party's March on London with a fiery address delivered to half a dozen parishioners saying their rosaries throughout. But I am convinced that there is one explanation which covers the absurd Mgr Worlock, the delinquent MPs, the cowardly coroner and the terrors of Taunton High Street. One could easily decide that all the glories of pomp and circumstance attaching to public life — the sceptre, mace and Sword of State, Black Rod, adulation of the Queen Mother and Lady Diana Spencer, be Upstanding for the Loyal Toast — derive, ultimately, from the state's power to stand one on a trapdoor, all alone, with a rope around one's neck. But I think that would be to take too drastic a view of the degree of terror or dread necessary to maintain social discipline. What is certain is that our problem is a circular one: that an ordered and disciplined society would be able to accommodate all the sadism and power mania of the frustrated Hitlers inside IL They could usefully be employed as NCps, prison warders, the nastier sort of police: man and the more obstructive sort of functionary within the administration. It 15 only the collapse of order and discipline within society which drives them to progressive religion and political 'idealism'.
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