The Right Approach to Crime

It’s a quarter of a century since Michael Howard delighted the Conservative Party conference with his 27 measures to crack down on crime. “Let us be clear”, he told 1993’s Blackpool delegates “Prison works. It ensures that we are protected from murderers, muggers and rapists, and it makes many who are tempted to commit crime think twice.” While disappointing activists urging the return of the death penalty and the birching of young offenders, Howard received a two-minute standing ovation- and arguably set penal policy on the baleful 25-year course from which it has yet to break free.

This week’s Conference sessions featuring Home Secretary Sajid Javid and Justice Secretary David Gauke were thankfully very different in substance and tone from Howard’s diatribe against a criminal justice system he thought “tilted too far in favour of the criminal and against the protection of the public”. While one 1993 delegate was cheered for an attack on social workers, judges and some clergymen who 'gain more from the Guardian than the Gospels’, Javid this week argued that the public health approach to tackling serious violence requires contributions from “all the key parts of government, law enforcement and society”.

In similar vein, Gauke expressed his mission as being to reform the way we get offenders “to make the right choice, to reject a life of criminality and take the opportunity to work, accept responsibility and be part of society.”  

He even felt able to tell Tory members that “for minor crimes, custody should only be used as a last resort”- without the conventional counterbalancing tough announcements other than a reassurance that “community sentences should not be a soft option”. But even this will be achieved not – as I had feared- by even tougher enforcement but improved offender supervision. It’s true that  Gauke is cracking down hard on crime in prison – but many will find it difficult to see why the investigations and enforcement to be undertaken by his new Financial Crime Unit are not already being done.  (Opposition wags with long memories missed an opportunity to label it the drones hotline).

Over the long term, you can argue of course that it is precisely Howard’s legacy – and the consequent doubling of the prison population - which has bought the Tories the space to be a bit more progressive on penal policy. David Cameron and Michael Gove’s attempt to fill that space by launching prison reform as “a great progressive cause in British politics” was overblown from the off and has since been derailed by the operational crises crippling prisons.

But while trying to solve these crises, the all too many ministers involved have continued to embrace the aim of creating “a prison system that doesn’t see prisoners as simply liabilities to be managed, but instead as potential assets to be harnessed”. Placing education and healthcare at the heart of youth custody is an example of that. It could have been achieved by extending the number of secure children’s homes rather than creating a new generation of secure schools - an error compounded by choosing an existing Secure Training Centre for the site of the first such school. But there is a lot to be said for the vision.

   

There is no guarantee that the Tories will retain their progressive approach to prisons. Backbenchers include a good number of hawkish voices - 1993 birching proposer Andrew Rosindell is MP for Romford. So for that matter, does the front bench.   Brexit Secretary Dominic Rabb and Chief Secretary to the Treasury Liz Truss have co-authored a book calling for longer tougher sentences in an entirely contracted out prison system. But to be fair neither did too much about it when they held ministerial posts in the MoJ.

That may reflect the fact that, in Cameron’s words, “politicians from all sides of the political spectrum are starting to realise the diminishing returns from ever higher levels of incarceration” and that increasing prison numbers is not financially sustainable, nor the most cost-effective way of cutting crime. But that "penal pragmatism" could change if crime continues to rise, and to rise up the table of public concerns- as it has been doing. Howard told the 1993 conference that the silent majority had become the angry majority and he wanted to make sure that “it is criminals that are frightened, not law-abiding members of the public.”  Criminal justice may have been the first policy area to be infected by populism but that doesn’t mean it couldn’t get another dose.