A DANGER to the PUBLIC

A good question came up on this week’s Any Questions?: “Has our society lost its grip on anti-social behaviour?” Fortunately it’s August so there were no MPs on the panel. David Ramsbotham, the former chief inspector of prisons suggested that Tony Blair’s famed undertaking to be “tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime” would have been just dandy if he hadn’t got diverted into attending to the causers of crime instead of the causes. “What worries me,” concluded Lord Ramsbotham, “is that we seem to have lost our grip on the way of developing people so that they concentrate on a social, a lawful and a useful life”.

The writer Bonnie Greer pointed out that “cities have always been violent”. None of the panel was in any mood to propose a means of containing the anti-social behaviour. But the questioner wasn’t talking about people shouting and throwing up in the street at night. She was talking about the rash of murders in several urban centres these last few weeks. Since Any Questions? went out there have been more. These murders are often but not always gang-related; they sometimes claim as their victims householders who try to protect their property or upbraid the miscreants. It’s all very well for Greer, who was brought up in Chicago, to comfort herself with the thought that cities are innately violent places: cities – in Britain at least – have not before been home to teenagers armed with guns and lethal blades.

I’m all in favour of our tackling the causes of crime, just as long as we’re prepared to face up to what those causes are. First, we have evolved into an inordinately acquisitive society. This has been the inevitable by-product of the triumph of capitalism. Everybody wants to have money and goods and health and sex and the time and space to feast on treats. Fifty years of advertising pumped into our homes through television, radio and now computers and mobile phones has persuaded us to accept marketing as part of our lives rather than as a gross intrusion. We want to be told what we want and we want to be able to have what we’re told we want as fast as possible. If that means knifing somebody in the street to get it, why would anybody be surprised?

Then we have a culture that heroicizes people who behave boorishly, selfishly and crudely. Paris Hilton is apparently a major celebrity because her home sex videos got onto the internet and she went to jail briefly for driving offences. Sportspeople are noticed if they throw tantrums and cheat. Self-publicists become television stars. “Celebrities” who get caught and punished are paid insane amounts of money for their “stories”, usually written by somebody else. We don’t have a culture that rewards diligence, loyalty, kindness, straight dealing and plain speaking. We canonize those who put two fingers up to the camera.

And our popular culture, so much of it churned out by America, pretends that real men carry guns and don’t flinch at killing “the bad guy” in a way that seems to leave no consequence. George W Bush must have bought into that myth when he defied Iraqi rebels to “bring it on”. Well, he got his wish. In the real world, dying hurts and the “bad guys” are not so easily identified as in the wild west and defeat is a good deal easier to stumble into than victory is to achieve.

But there’s time for all that later. Earnest discussions about how to tackle the malaise that breeds shooting and knifing on the streets can be indulged at leisure when we have it. The urgent need now is to stop the mayhem before it spirals into an unprecedented crisis. The government needs to act decisively, comprehensively and immediately. Putting more bobbies on the beat is just a sticking plaster on an amputation. The only result will be more police officers killed.

Here’s my solution: entirely rewrite penal policy. Only those convicted of a crime that may be categorized as constituting a danger to the public should go to prison. All other convicts should be punished in other ways, either by community service or by one-off or long-term financial penalties or by restriction of movement while remaining based at home. There are far too many people who should not be in prison. No white-collar crime, no drugs offence, no petty theft or vandalism or affray or refusal to pay a fine is appropriately met with incarceration. The government’s advisors should bend their minds to devising much more constructive treatment that both benefits the community (not least the victims) and keeps the offenders away from the dangerous (and dangerously influential) types they will otherwise meet in those breeding-grounds of serious crime that are our overcrowded prisons.

The prison places thus freed up should be reserved for those who are demonstrably a danger to the public. Murderers, rapists, muggers, violent hoodlums, sexual predators and anyone convicted of torture, assault, kidnap, stalking and threatening behaviour should go to jail. So should anyone who kills or maims through drunken, dangerous or reckless driving. And so should anyone, of whatever age, who is found to be carrying a gun or any other weapon that is palpably offensive. What is more, I would make these sentences profoundly punitive, both so as to remove dangerous individuals from the streets and so as to have a deterrent effect on those who might think of emulating them. I would make it a presumption that anyone found guilty on any of these counts would be held until they have passed the age of 60, at whatever age they committed the offence. There would be no parole and no remission in my scheme. A teenager might think twice about packing heat if the prospect of some 45 years in jail was the price of being caught. A mugger might baulk at trying to wrest someone’s mobile phone if she remembered that she will pass more than half of the rest of her days in Holloway if she has left her image on a CCTV camera.

Of course there would need to be some leeway. No nine year-old would go to Strangeways for half a century for having a penknife in his pocket. Social workers could be permitted to make a case that some people might need self-protection – what in some of the United States they call “armed response” – in some neighbourhoods. I do not advocate that everyone against whom a corrupt cop or two could concoct a “public danger” case would automatically be put away until they draw their pension. But I do believe that, in the face of a real urban crisis, drastic remedies are needed to bring some order. However young the current generation of violent offenders, they have to understand that they must take responsibility for their own actions. Long-term measures to make their prospects more enticing, their choices wider and their support systems more clued-up must follow. But as things stand, yes, our society has lost its grip on anti-social behaviour. And having remade our penal system so that it affords us all much greater protection, we do need a serious national debate on what sort of society we want to live in.