I think the position in past centuries was more complicated than popular histories would have it.
I remember hearing a talk about press-gangs by an eminent naval historian. He had plenty of examples of juries acquitting men - mostly merchant seamen, labdlubbers were rarely targeted - who had offered violent resistance to navy press-gangs. In some instances merchant ships had even opened fire on naval vessels laying in wait to seize their crews before they returned to port.
Juries acquitted them on the grounds that they were acting in self defence.
Debtors were sent to prison, of course and incarceration ranged from village lock-ups for holding drunkards or brawlers to short periods to long term imprisonment for political prisoners.
It's overly simplistic to suggest that they hanged people because they didn't have the means to levy custodial sentences. It was more complicated than that.
I cannot think of any other reason why criminals, who would often be teenagers, would be executed for minor cimes.
How do you know that criminals in days gone by were often teenagers? Are there statistics to prove this rather simplistic assertion?
There is a huge difference between protecting the public from violence and protecting them/us from petty crime.
In terms of major crimes, I’ve been the victim of a stabbing, suffered two burglaries, and had my car stolen off my drive overnight. Only one of those was a violent crime. And if I had to rank them in order of which I want to be protected from most then it would be right at the bottom of the list.
Of course, logically one option is to lock up all criminals for life. In one sense that prevents reoffending. It's hugely expensive and has the unfortunate side-effect of meaning there is no way back for young people who make a mistake.
I think we need to acknowledge here that it is very rarely "a mistake". It's far more common that it is a whole series of "mistakes".
Self-interest for you and me would dictate that we want a system that works and reduces crime.
Agreed. Posturing about being "tough on crime" is only useful if being "tough on crime" actually reduces crime.
In terms of sheer numbers, most crime is fairly low grade. Petty theft, shoplifting, snatching of handbags and phones, vandalism. I rather suspect it's these, rather than the much rarer stabbings and armed robberies, that have the greatest effect on the victim's quality of life.
I think the position in past centuries was more complicated than popular histories would have it.
I remember hearing a talk about press-gangs by an eminent naval historian. He had plenty of examples of juries acquitting men - mostly merchant seamen, labdlubbers were rarely targeted - who had offered violent resistance to navy press-gangs. In some instances merchant ships had even opened fire on naval vessels laying in wait to seize their crews before they returned to port.
Juries acquitted them on the grounds that they were acting in self defence.
Debtors were sent to prison, of course and incarceration ranged from village lock-ups for holding drunkards or brawlers to short periods to long term imprisonment for political prisoners.
It's overly simplistic to suggest that they hanged people because they didn't have the means to levy custodial sentences. It was more complicated than that.
I cannot think of any other reason why criminals, who would often be teenagers, would be executed for minor cimes.
How do you know that criminals in days gone by were often teenagers? Are there statistics to prove this rather simplistic assertion?
My simplistic assertion is based on the low life expectation in working class aqreas of Britain about 250 years ago.
I think the position in past centuries was more complicated than popular histories would have it.
I remember hearing a talk about press-gangs by an eminent naval historian. He had plenty of examples of juries acquitting men - mostly merchant seamen, labdlubbers were rarely targeted - who had offered violent resistance to navy press-gangs. In some instances merchant ships had even opened fire on naval vessels laying in wait to seize their crews before they returned to port.
Juries acquitted them on the grounds that they were acting in self defence.
Debtors were sent to prison, of course and incarceration ranged from village lock-ups for holding drunkards or brawlers to short periods to long term imprisonment for political prisoners.
It's overly simplistic to suggest that they hanged people because they didn't have the means to levy custodial sentences. It was more complicated than that.
I cannot think of any other reason why criminals, who would often be teenagers, would be executed for minor cimes.
How do you know that criminals in days gone by were often teenagers? Are there statistics to prove this rather simplistic assertion?
My simplistic assertion is based on the low life expectation in working class aqreas of Britain about 250 years ago.
That means a lot of kids dying under 5, not a lot of teenagers barely making it to adulthood.
A few years ago I attended a very interesting talk from a deputy governor of a large UK prison. I still remember half-a-dozen striking things she said. Here are a few. Possibly I have misrememberd some in which case I apologise.
* Escape from prison is rare, with the prevalence of CCTV in wider society making it almost pointless to try. Much more troublesome are prisoners breaking from one area of a prison to another (e.g. into a store of food or medical goods), or illict goods getting into prisons via e.g. drones.
* Non-violent sex offenders (e.g. many paedophiles) are the least aggressive and most co-operative category of prisoner, and tend to behave very well while inside, so much so that prison governors love to have as many of them as possible and will go to considerable lengths to achieve this.
* Women's prisons are another world, with a vastly different atmosphere. "I had my hair done by one inmate," she recalled, "whereas in men's prisons officers would be more likely to have excrement thrown at them". (She was deputy governor of a men's prison at the time of the talk).
* The day of release is a particularly dangerous time for prisoners. One problem is the release of property to them which may contain concealed drugs resulting in many overdoses.
* In response to the question "what is the single change that would most improve the prison system": Much more investment in deprived areas to help communities and improve life-chances of people in them. By the time someone reaches prison it is much more difficult to help them.
* The Scandinavian model is much better in almost every way than the UK model. But it requires buy-in from the general public, who would have to accept that many more people who have committed quite serious crimes will be living in their communities.
This is where general attitudes are nonsensical. Of course people who have committed serious crimes are living in our communities - they are already, and always will unless they are imprisoned for life or killed. This is an inevitable, incontrovertible fact, which just needs to be got over NOW. Before any more pearl-clutching leads to even more stupid, ineffectual but "reassuring" (i.e. bullshit prejudice reinforcing) policies waste any more tens of billions, e.g. by building prisons to house the pointlessly incarcerated.
This is where general attitudes are nonsensical. Of course people who have committed serious crimes are living in our communities - they are already, and always will unless they are imprisoned for life or killed. This is an inevitable, incontrovertible fact, which just needs to be got over NOW. Before any more pearl-clutching leads to even more stupid, ineffectual but "reassuring" (i.e. bullshit prejudice reinforcing) policies waste any more tens of billions, e.g. by building prisons to house the pointlessly incarcerated.
If you want prisoners to be treated better and rehabilitated, you would want more prisons to be built.
I think the position in past centuries was more complicated than popular histories would have it.
I remember hearing a talk about press-gangs by an eminent naval historian. He had plenty of examples of juries acquitting men - mostly merchant seamen, labdlubbers were rarely targeted - who had offered violent resistance to navy press-gangs. In some instances merchant ships had even opened fire on naval vessels laying in wait to seize their crews before they returned to port.
Juries acquitted them on the grounds that they were acting in self defence.
Debtors were sent to prison, of course and incarceration ranged from village lock-ups for holding drunkards or brawlers to short periods to long term imprisonment for political prisoners.
It's overly simplistic to suggest that they hanged people because they didn't have the means to levy custodial sentences. It was more complicated than that.
I cannot think of any other reason why criminals, who would often be teenagers, would be executed for minor cimes.
How do you know that criminals in days gone by were often teenagers? Are there statistics to prove this rather simplistic assertion?
My simplistic assertion is based on the low life expectation in working class aqreas of Britain about 250 years ago.
That means a lot of kids dying under 5, not a lot of teenagers barely making it to adulthood.
Yes, absolutely. The life-expectancy rates in previous centuries were heavily influenced by high infant mortality. It's been estimated that 1 in 5 children in the 17th century did not survive childhood, if I remember rightly from my reading around these things.
I imagine the rate was a lot higher in poorer areas. If you survived childhood you stood a reasonable chance of living through adulthood unless there was an epidemic or pandemic of some kind. Plenty of women died in childbirth though and with poor diet and sanitation then yes, things were tough.
Even today, there's a 10 year life expectancy gap between the poorer and wealthier parts of the region where I live.
My Grandad was born in 1912 and grew up in desperately poor conditions in Birmingham. He was one of 12, with others lost at birth or died in infancy. One of his brothers died at 16, a sister in her 30s and the rest lived to a reasonable age. His eldest sister died when she was 100.
The reason people were hanged for what we would consider comparatively minor crimes wasn't because there were not enough prison places but because more crimes carried a capital sentence.
We have to remember how different social mores were.
Here's a for instance... back in the late 1600s there was an annual event in London where a mock procession satirising cardinals, monks and Catholic clergy culminated in the burning of an effigy of the Pope.
To add realism, live cats were put in wooden cages inside the effigy so that their piteous mewing screams would serve as sound-effects to convey the idea of the Pope screeching in agony.
Nobody objected.
Now, I'm not suggesting that our ancestors were all cold, callous and heartless, simply that they viewed these things differently. Harsher punishments were part of that.
I think the position in past centuries was more complicated than popular histories would have it.
I remember hearing a talk about press-gangs by an eminent naval historian. He had plenty of examples of juries acquitting men - mostly merchant seamen, labdlubbers were rarely targeted - who had offered violent resistance to navy press-gangs. In some instances merchant ships had even opened fire on naval vessels laying in wait to seize their crews before they returned to port.
Juries acquitted them on the grounds that they were acting in self defence.
Debtors were sent to prison, of course and incarceration ranged from village lock-ups for holding drunkards or brawlers to short periods to long term imprisonment for political prisoners.
It's overly simplistic to suggest that they hanged people because they didn't have the means to levy custodial sentences. It was more complicated than that.
I cannot think of any other reason why criminals, who would often be teenagers, would be executed for minor cimes.
How do you know that criminals in days gone by were often teenagers? Are there statistics to prove this rather simplistic assertion?
My simplistic assertion is based on the low life expectation in working class aqreas of Britain about 250 years ago.
Why only 250 years ago? Prisons go right back to the Middle Ages and earlier.
There is a reason why the saying “might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb”exists. Local land owners would also be local magistrates and judges. If you stole from their property you didn’t get what we would call a fair trial today.
There is a reason why the saying “might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb”exists. Local land owners would also be local magistrates and judges. If you stole from their property you didn’t get what we would call a fair trial today.
I think that in talking about deterrence with regard to sentencing this is a factor we have to consider. Calls for ratcheting up sentences for sexual or drug offences fail to take into account the effect on offender behaviour. Putting it bluntly, if you've already committed an offence that gets you the maximum punishment, there is an incentive to commit any and all crimes that might help you avoid capture, including the murder of victims and/or police. It's not dissimilar to this ancient uprising: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Chen_Sheng_and_Wu_Guang_uprising&diffonly=true#History
King Athelstan (924/927-939) found that harsh penalties visited on children were ineffective, so he raised the minimum age for the death penalty to fifteen, *because he thought it too cruel to kill so many young people and for such small crimes as he understood to be the case everywhere*.
He seems to have regarded robbery and theft as the most evil of crimes - those were indeed different times...
There is a huge difference between protecting the public from violence and protecting them/us from petty crime.
In terms of major crimes, I’ve been the victim of a stabbing, suffered two burglaries, and had my car stolen off my drive overnight. Only one of those was a violent crime. And if I had to rank them in order of which I want to be protected from most then it would be right at the bottom of the list.
Okay, but unless you envisage locking up minor offenders forever, at some point they'll be out of prison, and the path that lowers their chance of re-offending is more likely to lead to the outcome you prefer.
I seriously doubt that big businessmen or politicians were the ones who stole my car.
I'll never find out for sure, of course, because the sum total of the police response to it happening was to give me a crime number so I could put in an insurance claim. Which, inevitably, wasn't enough to get a suitable replacement meaning I had to dig into the savings - and, of course, lose my no claims bonus and have to pay significantly higher premiums for the next decade or so. Meanwhile, the toerags who took it will have had a nice little payday after taking it to a friendly chop shop and are at liberty to do the same to as many other families as they like. But hey, nobody got physically hurt so it doesn't really matter, right?
I seriously doubt that big businessmen or politicians were the ones who stole my car.
I'll never find out for sure, of course, because the sum total of the police response to it happening was to give me a crime number so I could put in an insurance claim. Which, inevitably, wasn't enough to get a suitable replacement meaning I had to dig into the savings - and, of course, lose my no claims bonus and have to pay significantly higher premiums for the next decade or so. Meanwhile, the toerags who took it will have had a nice little payday after taking it to a friendly chop shop and are at liberty to do the same to as many other families as they like. But hey, nobody got physically hurt so it doesn't really matter, right?
Which seems to be a wild simplification of what's been said to the point of being almost untrue.
In regard to the role of imprisonment to protect the public then the risk of a non-custodial sentence needs to consider the chances of committing further crimes, including the potential for other measures (eg: curfews and electronic tags, or mental health or addiction support) to mitigate the risks, and the consequences to the public of repeat offences. What we're basically saying is there needs to be a risk assessment, there would be non-violent criminals who are almost certain to re-offend if not locked up and some violent criminals who are almost certainly not going to re-offend. There should, I'd say, be a precautionary principle verging on the side of safety, especially where re-offending has potential serious consequences to life, which probably makes it much less likely that violent offenders will be considered safe if given a non-custodial sentence.
There are, of course, other roles for imprisonment that would impact the decision of whether to give a custodial or non-custodial sentence.
Public safety is an important aspect of sentencing, and property doesn't get the same protection as the person. Human life, and the human body, is worthy of more protection than property.
Crimes against property are nearly all linked to drug addiction. Well, that might be a slight exaggeration but the connection is very, very strong. They are also crimes of poverty. So sentencing is really very secondary - the best crime prevention is to work on the prevention of poverty as the best form of prevention of crime. No crime, no sentencing - no sentencing, no prison. That's the ideal, and it's the direction we need to move in.
There is a considerable extent to which sentencing is too late, though it attracts the Daily Mail mentality. The emphasis needs to be on crime prevention through economic and educational measures, to positively reinforce communities and through them the wider society, rather than on sentencing and dealing with the consequences of failure, otherwise known as crime/offending.
Which seems to be a wild simplification of what's been said to the point of being almost untrue.
Apart from anything else non-custodial sentences are quite different from not making an effort to catch criminals to start with.
Quite. The issue is that thieves know the police don't have the time or resources to bring them to justice, not that the punishment is insufficient on the rare occasion they are caught.
No, a direct response to the idea - posted a few times on this thread - that violent criminals should be locked up but non-violent ones shouldn’t.
It is because you finished with this line: "But hey, nobody got physically hurt so it doesn't really matter, right?"
Which is a complete travesty of everything said in this context.
The WHOLE point of the discussion is looking at criminal justice measures that work. There is a LOT of evidence that for most situations, non-custodial sentences are more effective at preventing crime - at reducing the number of car thefts to take your specific example. We can never know, but there's decent odds that whichever toe-rag stole your car had probably done it before...
Everyone here has acknowledged that imprisonment will always be part of the armoury of criminal justice - especially for serious violent offences. But we are trying to have a grown-up conversation about what works and what doesn't. Your line at the end there is exactly why (probably all) politicians are tempted to appear tough rather than do something that works. Because that's how victims of crime - and those who fear being victims of crime - feel.
Feelings are not irrelevant, but they can't determine an effective policy. An effective policy must always consist of doing what works. Every single time - even when it isn't what specific groups want.
Frankly, society as a whole needs justice, and justice is primarily what prevents further offences - which is mostly alleviating poverty and improving education.
The emphasis needs to be on crime prevention through economic and educational measures, to positively reinforce communities and through them the wider society, rather than on sentencing and dealing with the consequences of failure, otherwise known as crime/offending.
Can’t we do both? Put in place all the positive community reinforcement, education, etc so that nobody has any reason or need to commit crimes, and then come down like a ton of bricks on the ones that commit them nevertheless?
The emphasis needs to be on crime prevention through economic and educational measures, to positively reinforce communities and through them the wider society, rather than on sentencing and dealing with the consequences of failure, otherwise known as crime/offending.
Can’t we do both? Put in place all the positive community reinforcement, education, etc so that nobody has any reason or need to commit crimes, and then come down like a ton of bricks on the ones that commit them nevertheless?
There's an assumption here that prison is the ton of bricks.
Now to you or me it would be. Lose your job, quite possibly your house. Possibility of violence from other inmates. Life-long consequences. Community punishments - just like work which we're used to getting up for, just not being paid for it.
This is reversed for other demographics, which are (a) over represented in the prison population, and (b) arguably why prison doesn't deter.
No job, irregular work, unstable work, unreliable work as opposed to a career. Shitty bedsits or shared house rooms you get evicted from every six months when the landlord wants to double the rent. Can you imagine why prison might not seem such a bad option when your life is chaotic, violence not uncommon and a structured career a fairy-tale? And when half your mates any given time are inside anyway.
Perhaps we need to change the narrative - when someone is sentenced at the magistrate's court, perhaps "sentenced to..." rather than "spared jail" in the local newspaper headlines might be a start?
Should have mentioned - fines are problematic too. If you're rich they're just one of life's little expenses; if you haven't a pot to piss in you get "you stole this because you were desperate for cash so we'll make you a few hundred quid more desperate for cash".
there used to be a way of fining a percentage of weekly disposable income. Something like that anyway. It's still live in many places, especially in northern Europe, and the UK tried it in 1992/3. Seems to me like people imposing fines just couldn't be bothered to deal properly with the poor, and wanted them to stop being so poor. My how things do change. Here is the Wiki article on the subject: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Day-fine
Interesting.. Sounds rather like our current problem with Labour - refusing to make the rich pay more, as is necessary for truly progressive taxation. Not quite the implication I had gleaned from the Wiki entry, but you are probably better informed on this than I am.
This country was very late to have a proper police service as such a force was long thought to be a threat to English liberty. It was well into the 19th century before every area had what we would see as a 'normal' police force.
Before that, society was largely self-policing. The 'village constable' was a local punter dragooned into the job for a year on a 'voluntary' basis. Naturally, a farmer or blacksmith would put his 'constable' work low down on his list of priorities.
This was one reason why penalties were draconian. Because in many cases, you were most unlikely to be caught. The system only really worked at all because most of the country was rural, and everyone knew who the local Claud Greengrass was. Indeed, everyone knew everyone else. The local squire, invariably a magistrate, had a great deal of discretion and people deemed to be 'good characters' might well get off lightly. Part of local patronage was the power of getting 'your' people off the hook.
Having (at last) an efficient police force and system of prisons meant that criminals were more likely to be caught, and over time sentences became less draconian. Though 6 months in a Victorian prison would be no picnic.
To come to modern times:
1. Many prisoners are illiterate or innumerate. This reflects the failure of the education system and allied functions. How, in a modern society, are such persons to gain an honest living? The days when hundreds of illiterate porters were employed are long gone. What these folk need, above all, is education.
2. Another group have mental issues, sometimes made worse by drug use. We all know about the weakness of NHS mental health services, don't we? These folk really need treatment. But how do you provide it? Prison merely contains them in the sense of keeping them out of circulation. You could argue it makes prisons a less humane alternative to the old asylum.
Kids leaving school illiterate or innumerate very rarely reflects problems with the education system, but problems at home and/or falling through the gaps of massively overstretched social services. Prisoners are also massively more likely to have learning difficulties. Whether that is a risk factor in committing crime or merely in getting caught I'm unsure.
Also, the proportion of neurodivergent prisoners, especially but not exclusively with ADHD, is just ridiculous. This tends to correlate both with low educational attainment and with addiction. But then, nothing has been allowed to be people shaped for the last fourteen years - everything has been bleakly austerity-shaped.
Should have mentioned - fines are problematic too. If you're rich they're just one of life's little expenses; if you haven't a pot to piss in you get "you stole this because you were desperate for cash so we'll make you a few hundred quid more desperate for cash".
Early in my career I was often involved in trying to address the problem of Street Prostitution. When all said and done it was basically a nuisance particularly when their soliciting was done in residential areas. For their first two offences, newcomers got official cautions ( There had to be these two cautions or a conviction to prove they were common prostitutes. So they eventually finished up in court. First offence was £10 fine. Second offence was £25 fine( More than one weeks avaerage wages at that time ) . Logically there was only one way to pay these fines. Next court appearance was probabtion. Next court appearance was a 3 month suspended sentence. Next court appearance resulted in 3 months in The Chokey but that cleared the slate.
If they continued after release it was back to the fines and so on.
Eventually somebody had the bright idea of 'persuading' them to move away from Residential areas.
My point is made to demonstrate the futility of non custodial sentences in the form of fines for people with no money.
Sure, I get that @Telford and your example raises further issues, of course.
What can we as a society do to deal with issues like this?
When I lived in a run-down area of a major city my entire street had to deal with low-level anti-social behaviour and crime every single day, punctuated by regular instances of more 'serious' crimes such as burglaries, vandalism and violence.
I often used to discuss these issues with the local hobbies who did their level best to contend with and contain a situation that seemed to be escalating in scale and intensity.
Many were world-weary. They'd seen it all before. Yet day after day they carried on trying to protect the public and enforce the law.
They often told me that it wasn't an issue of 'solving' the problem but of containing it or simply moving it from one location to another.
Please don't misunderstand me. These weren't hard-bitten cynics. Many of them went above and beyond to engage positively with local youths and with the community in general.
I've known several officers who did such things during their front-line careers and on into retirement. They were passionate about introducing young people to sport, outdoor activities and anything positive and worthwhile.
We can't expect the police to do it all, nor politicians (of whatever stripe). There's no quick fix or magic bullet.
It's glib to say, 'Give them the Gospel ...' too.
What does that mean in practice?
What does it look like?
My point is made to demonstrate the futility of non custodial sentences in the form of fines for people with no money.
100% agree. Of course custodial sentences are similarly futile.
One of the things to always think about in criminal justice is the situation of the criminal and the risk/benefit analysis.
For someone with a home and a career and an income, there is very little temptation to shop-lift. I might not get caught, but if I did, it would cost me a HUGE amount. For someone who is very poor and struggling to get by, the cost - even if caught - is realistically quite small whilst the gain in terms of perhaps just enough food to eat is relatively large.
In @Telford's example, you have young women who would almost certainly consider that they have no realistic alternative. Do we realistically expect them not to reoffend?
This is just one area. In other areas, like violence, there may be drug addiction or alcoholism etc. involved. Different approaches are needed for different situations.
My point being that it is entirely predictable that certain approaches will not work and yet we cling to them anyway.
To come back to the point, this is why the appointment of Lord Timpson makes me so optimistic. So much to do, but for the first time in a long time we have someone who wants to fix it. I watch with considerable interest.
My point is made to demonstrate the futility of non custodial sentences in the form of fines for people with no money.
100% agree. Of course custodial sentences are similarly futile.
Custodial sentences do at least have the benefit that the criminal isn't reoffending while inside.
In @Telford's example, you have young women who would almost certainly consider that they have no realistic alternative. Do we realistically expect them not to reoffend?
This is just one area. In other areas, like violence, there may be drug addiction or alcoholism etc. involved. Different approaches are needed for different situations.
My point being that it is entirely predictable that certain approaches will not work and yet we cling to them anyway.
ISTM that nothing will work. No wonder gated communities exist.
Yes the debate around the speech should be interesting. There is already a question tabled about the 2 child benefit cap. If Starmer has any sense he will listen as the public want this to happen
Comments
How do you know that criminals in days gone by were often teenagers? Are there statistics to prove this rather simplistic assertion?
In terms of major crimes, I’ve been the victim of a stabbing, suffered two burglaries, and had my car stolen off my drive overnight. Only one of those was a violent crime. And if I had to rank them in order of which I want to be protected from most then it would be right at the bottom of the list.
I think we need to acknowledge here that it is very rarely "a mistake". It's far more common that it is a whole series of "mistakes".
Agreed. Posturing about being "tough on crime" is only useful if being "tough on crime" actually reduces crime.
In terms of sheer numbers, most crime is fairly low grade. Petty theft, shoplifting, snatching of handbags and phones, vandalism. I rather suspect it's these, rather than the much rarer stabbings and armed robberies, that have the greatest effect on the victim's quality of life.
My simplistic assertion is based on the low life expectation in working class aqreas of Britain about 250 years ago.
That means a lot of kids dying under 5, not a lot of teenagers barely making it to adulthood.
* Escape from prison is rare, with the prevalence of CCTV in wider society making it almost pointless to try. Much more troublesome are prisoners breaking from one area of a prison to another (e.g. into a store of food or medical goods), or illict goods getting into prisons via e.g. drones.
* Non-violent sex offenders (e.g. many paedophiles) are the least aggressive and most co-operative category of prisoner, and tend to behave very well while inside, so much so that prison governors love to have as many of them as possible and will go to considerable lengths to achieve this.
* Women's prisons are another world, with a vastly different atmosphere. "I had my hair done by one inmate," she recalled, "whereas in men's prisons officers would be more likely to have excrement thrown at them". (She was deputy governor of a men's prison at the time of the talk).
* The day of release is a particularly dangerous time for prisoners. One problem is the release of property to them which may contain concealed drugs resulting in many overdoses.
* In response to the question "what is the single change that would most improve the prison system": Much more investment in deprived areas to help communities and improve life-chances of people in them. By the time someone reaches prison it is much more difficult to help them.
* The Scandinavian model is much better in almost every way than the UK model. But it requires buy-in from the general public, who would have to accept that many more people who have committed quite serious crimes will be living in their communities.
If you want prisoners to be treated better and rehabilitated, you would want more prisons to be built.
Yes, absolutely. The life-expectancy rates in previous centuries were heavily influenced by high infant mortality. It's been estimated that 1 in 5 children in the 17th century did not survive childhood, if I remember rightly from my reading around these things.
I imagine the rate was a lot higher in poorer areas. If you survived childhood you stood a reasonable chance of living through adulthood unless there was an epidemic or pandemic of some kind. Plenty of women died in childbirth though and with poor diet and sanitation then yes, things were tough.
Even today, there's a 10 year life expectancy gap between the poorer and wealthier parts of the region where I live.
My Grandad was born in 1912 and grew up in desperately poor conditions in Birmingham. He was one of 12, with others lost at birth or died in infancy. One of his brothers died at 16, a sister in her 30s and the rest lived to a reasonable age. His eldest sister died when she was 100.
The reason people were hanged for what we would consider comparatively minor crimes wasn't because there were not enough prison places but because more crimes carried a capital sentence.
We have to remember how different social mores were.
Here's a for instance... back in the late 1600s there was an annual event in London where a mock procession satirising cardinals, monks and Catholic clergy culminated in the burning of an effigy of the Pope.
To add realism, live cats were put in wooden cages inside the effigy so that their piteous mewing screams would serve as sound-effects to convey the idea of the Pope screeching in agony.
Nobody objected.
Now, I'm not suggesting that our ancestors were all cold, callous and heartless, simply that they viewed these things differently. Harsher punishments were part of that.
Why only 250 years ago? Prisons go right back to the Middle Ages and earlier.
I think that in talking about deterrence with regard to sentencing this is a factor we have to consider. Calls for ratcheting up sentences for sexual or drug offences fail to take into account the effect on offender behaviour. Putting it bluntly, if you've already committed an offence that gets you the maximum punishment, there is an incentive to commit any and all crimes that might help you avoid capture, including the murder of victims and/or police. It's not dissimilar to this ancient uprising: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Chen_Sheng_and_Wu_Guang_uprising&diffonly=true#History
He seems to have regarded robbery and theft as the most evil of crimes - those were indeed different times...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Æthelstan
Indeed - these days we barely even seem to consider them crimes at all.
Well, quite - one has only to look at big business and politics to see that this a true thing...
Okay, but unless you envisage locking up minor offenders forever, at some point they'll be out of prison, and the path that lowers their chance of re-offending is more likely to lead to the outcome you prefer.
I'll never find out for sure, of course, because the sum total of the police response to it happening was to give me a crime number so I could put in an insurance claim. Which, inevitably, wasn't enough to get a suitable replacement meaning I had to dig into the savings - and, of course, lose my no claims bonus and have to pay significantly higher premiums for the next decade or so. Meanwhile, the toerags who took it will have had a nice little payday after taking it to a friendly chop shop and are at liberty to do the same to as many other families as they like. But hey, nobody got physically hurt so it doesn't really matter, right?
Ahhh, a Strawman.
In regard to the role of imprisonment to protect the public then the risk of a non-custodial sentence needs to consider the chances of committing further crimes, including the potential for other measures (eg: curfews and electronic tags, or mental health or addiction support) to mitigate the risks, and the consequences to the public of repeat offences. What we're basically saying is there needs to be a risk assessment, there would be non-violent criminals who are almost certain to re-offend if not locked up and some violent criminals who are almost certainly not going to re-offend. There should, I'd say, be a precautionary principle verging on the side of safety, especially where re-offending has potential serious consequences to life, which probably makes it much less likely that violent offenders will be considered safe if given a non-custodial sentence.
There are, of course, other roles for imprisonment that would impact the decision of whether to give a custodial or non-custodial sentence.
Crimes against property are nearly all linked to drug addiction. Well, that might be a slight exaggeration but the connection is very, very strong. They are also crimes of poverty. So sentencing is really very secondary - the best crime prevention is to work on the prevention of poverty as the best form of prevention of crime. No crime, no sentencing - no sentencing, no prison. That's the ideal, and it's the direction we need to move in.
Poverty is also linked to violent crime, according to this report: https://www.london.gov.uk/programmes-strategies/communities-and-social-justice/londons-violence-reduction-unit/link-between-poverty-and-violent-crime
There is a considerable extent to which sentencing is too late, though it attracts the Daily Mail mentality. The emphasis needs to be on crime prevention through economic and educational measures, to positively reinforce communities and through them the wider society, rather than on sentencing and dealing with the consequences of failure, otherwise known as crime/offending.
Apart from anything else non-custodial sentences are quite different from not making an effort to catch criminals to start with.
Quite. The issue is that thieves know the police don't have the time or resources to bring them to justice, not that the punishment is insufficient on the rare occasion they are caught.
It is because you finished with this line: "But hey, nobody got physically hurt so it doesn't really matter, right?"
Which is a complete travesty of everything said in this context.
The WHOLE point of the discussion is looking at criminal justice measures that work. There is a LOT of evidence that for most situations, non-custodial sentences are more effective at preventing crime - at reducing the number of car thefts to take your specific example. We can never know, but there's decent odds that whichever toe-rag stole your car had probably done it before...
Everyone here has acknowledged that imprisonment will always be part of the armoury of criminal justice - especially for serious violent offences. But we are trying to have a grown-up conversation about what works and what doesn't. Your line at the end there is exactly why (probably all) politicians are tempted to appear tough rather than do something that works. Because that's how victims of crime - and those who fear being victims of crime - feel.
AFZ
Frankly, society as a whole needs justice, and justice is primarily what prevents further offences - which is mostly alleviating poverty and improving education.
Can’t we do both? Put in place all the positive community reinforcement, education, etc so that nobody has any reason or need to commit crimes, and then come down like a ton of bricks on the ones that commit them nevertheless?
There's an assumption here that prison is the ton of bricks.
Now to you or me it would be. Lose your job, quite possibly your house. Possibility of violence from other inmates. Life-long consequences. Community punishments - just like work which we're used to getting up for, just not being paid for it.
This is reversed for other demographics, which are (a) over represented in the prison population, and (b) arguably why prison doesn't deter.
No job, irregular work, unstable work, unreliable work as opposed to a career. Shitty bedsits or shared house rooms you get evicted from every six months when the landlord wants to double the rent. Can you imagine why prison might not seem such a bad option when your life is chaotic, violence not uncommon and a structured career a fairy-tale? And when half your mates any given time are inside anyway.
Perhaps we need to change the narrative - when someone is sentenced at the magistrate's court, perhaps "sentenced to..." rather than "spared jail" in the local newspaper headlines might be a start?
Before that, society was largely self-policing. The 'village constable' was a local punter dragooned into the job for a year on a 'voluntary' basis. Naturally, a farmer or blacksmith would put his 'constable' work low down on his list of priorities.
This was one reason why penalties were draconian. Because in many cases, you were most unlikely to be caught. The system only really worked at all because most of the country was rural, and everyone knew who the local Claud Greengrass was. Indeed, everyone knew everyone else. The local squire, invariably a magistrate, had a great deal of discretion and people deemed to be 'good characters' might well get off lightly. Part of local patronage was the power of getting 'your' people off the hook.
Having (at last) an efficient police force and system of prisons meant that criminals were more likely to be caught, and over time sentences became less draconian. Though 6 months in a Victorian prison would be no picnic.
To come to modern times:
1. Many prisoners are illiterate or innumerate. This reflects the failure of the education system and allied functions. How, in a modern society, are such persons to gain an honest living? The days when hundreds of illiterate porters were employed are long gone. What these folk need, above all, is education.
2. Another group have mental issues, sometimes made worse by drug use. We all know about the weakness of NHS mental health services, don't we? These folk really need treatment. But how do you provide it? Prison merely contains them in the sense of keeping them out of circulation. You could argue it makes prisons a less humane alternative to the old asylum.
Early in my career I was often involved in trying to address the problem of Street Prostitution. When all said and done it was basically a nuisance particularly when their soliciting was done in residential areas. For their first two offences, newcomers got official cautions ( There had to be these two cautions or a conviction to prove they were common prostitutes. So they eventually finished up in court. First offence was £10 fine. Second offence was £25 fine( More than one weeks avaerage wages at that time ) . Logically there was only one way to pay these fines. Next court appearance was probabtion. Next court appearance was a 3 month suspended sentence. Next court appearance resulted in 3 months in The Chokey but that cleared the slate.
If they continued after release it was back to the fines and so on.
Eventually somebody had the bright idea of 'persuading' them to move away from Residential areas.
My point is made to demonstrate the futility of non custodial sentences in the form of fines for people with no money.
What can we as a society do to deal with issues like this?
When I lived in a run-down area of a major city my entire street had to deal with low-level anti-social behaviour and crime every single day, punctuated by regular instances of more 'serious' crimes such as burglaries, vandalism and violence.
I often used to discuss these issues with the local hobbies who did their level best to contend with and contain a situation that seemed to be escalating in scale and intensity.
Many were world-weary. They'd seen it all before. Yet day after day they carried on trying to protect the public and enforce the law.
They often told me that it wasn't an issue of 'solving' the problem but of containing it or simply moving it from one location to another.
Please don't misunderstand me. These weren't hard-bitten cynics. Many of them went above and beyond to engage positively with local youths and with the community in general.
I've known several officers who did such things during their front-line careers and on into retirement. They were passionate about introducing young people to sport, outdoor activities and anything positive and worthwhile.
We can't expect the police to do it all, nor politicians (of whatever stripe). There's no quick fix or magic bullet.
It's glib to say, 'Give them the Gospel ...' too.
What does that mean in practice?
What does it look like?
I'm thinking aloud here.
100% agree. Of course custodial sentences are similarly futile.
One of the things to always think about in criminal justice is the situation of the criminal and the risk/benefit analysis.
For someone with a home and a career and an income, there is very little temptation to shop-lift. I might not get caught, but if I did, it would cost me a HUGE amount. For someone who is very poor and struggling to get by, the cost - even if caught - is realistically quite small whilst the gain in terms of perhaps just enough food to eat is relatively large.
In @Telford's example, you have young women who would almost certainly consider that they have no realistic alternative. Do we realistically expect them not to reoffend?
This is just one area. In other areas, like violence, there may be drug addiction or alcoholism etc. involved. Different approaches are needed for different situations.
My point being that it is entirely predictable that certain approaches will not work and yet we cling to them anyway.
To come back to the point, this is why the appointment of Lord Timpson makes me so optimistic. So much to do, but for the first time in a long time we have someone who wants to fix it. I watch with considerable interest.
AFZ
Custodial sentences do at least have the benefit that the criminal isn't reoffending while inside.
ISTM that nothing will work. No wonder gated communities exist.
That is not necessarily true, prisons often see violence and drug dealing - for example.
Precisely.
And regardless of what crime anyone has committed they should not be the victim of a violent crime.
AFZ
Reform of the MHA is certainly an interesting one...
Why is "violent" in that sentence? Surely people shouldn't be the victims of any crime? That's the whole point I've been making for the last few days.
Indeed. But the most likely crime to suffer whilst an inmate is a violent one.