Founded 1980
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Graham Smith
Jan Thompson
Graham Mumby-Croft


Paul Laxton
 BORIS PLAYS THE CRIME CARD

The new Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, has certainly landed running with a series of eye-catching announcements, and a plethora of pocket-picking spending promises. How Mr Johnson plans to pay for his programme is not within the remit of this editorial, but the potential impact on the criminal justice system certainly is. The announcement of a plan to recruit 20,000 more police officers in the next three years can certainly be welcomed, but the curmudgeon in me cannot resist mentioning that that is pretty much the number of officers that were cut during the period of austerity. With knife crime rampant and detection rates at record lows restoring the visible uniformed presence and deterrent on our streets cannot come too soon. Stop and Search is controversial but Mr Johnson points to his record in reducing knife crime during his tenure as Mayor of London.

The proposals for the prison system may also be welcome to the general public but are much less soundly based. Mr Johnson seems to have swallowed hook line and line the myth that sentences are soft and that criminals are not punished. He might like to digest some statistics that disprove the proposition. Between June 2007 and June 2017 the custody rate from our courts rose from 24% to 31% of guilty verdicts, and is still rising. In the same period the average sentence for indictable offences rose from 15.4 months to 19.8 months. For the most serious offences where a determinate sentence was handed down, there was a staggering increase from an average of 31.6 months to 57.1 months. The number of sentences in excess of ten years tripled in the same period . At the heaviest end of the market life tariffs have gone up from 12.5 years in 2003 to 21.3 years in 2016. At 141 per 100,000 England has the highest imprisonment rate in Europe. Interestingly, the rate of imprisonment in Northern Ireland is much lower, at 79 per 100,000. If a province where normal policing is still problematic twenty-one years after the Good Friday agreement can wean itself of an addiction to custody, then surely there is something happening here that the Conservative party can learn from.  

The increased spending on 'airport style' security is very welcome, as is the long promised crackdown on mobile phones. However if the government is serious about the drug problem it will need to reach all the way down the system up to and including the open estate. I wish I could believe the promise of 10,000 extra places. In reality, according to the Prison Reform Trust, it would need another 12,000 places just to eliminate overcrowding, assuming no further increase in the population. It is pretty clear that the government intends to increase the numbers in prison as a result of which our prisons will remain squalid and disorderly places. A further increase in sentence lengths and the abolition of automatic release at the halfway point can have no other effect than a significant population spike. 

Furthermore Mr Johnson might like to consider the potential response of the European Court of Human Rights to his proposal to give discretion over early release to prison governors. Readers will recall that back in 2002 ECHR ruled that the governor's power to award added days was a breach of human rights on the basis that he or she did not constitute an impartial tribunal when conducting Adjudications. It is difficult to avoid drawing the potential parallel. Governors have not possessed the power to detain prisoners up to the final date of their sentence outside of the formal disciplinary system since the abolition of Borstal training. Legal firms specialising in human rights will be preparing already.

PAUL LAXTON

Issue 81 Autumn 2019