Bill Carmichael: Clear evidence for tough justice

If you are an evil right winger, like me, then you tend to believe that the longer local yobbo, Johnny Scumbag, is locked up, the less likely he is to mug your granny as she picks up her pension.

If, however, you are a bleeding heart liberal, like our current justice secretary Kenneth Clarke, you believe that “warehousing” offenders in jail is uncivilised and if we are bit nicer to criminals we may just persuade them to stop terrorising their neighbours.

I think where you end up on this spectrum of opinion largely depends on your life experiences. If, like me, you’ve personally witnessed the damage and utter misery inflicted on vulnerable people in working class communities by criminal behaviour, you will tend to end up at one end of the scale. On the other hand, if you’ve spent your life in the crime-free suburbs reading Marxist sociology on how criminality is really the rebel yell of the oppressed against a reactionary state, you’ll end up at the other.

Let’s face it; we’re never going to see eye to eye in a month of Sundays.

So let’s for a moment set aside ideological differences and anecdotal evidence and concentrate on the cold, hard facts.

This week the Ministry of Justice released the results of a study which compared the effectiveness of various types of sentences for the first time. The results showed that criminals who are given longer jail terms are substantially less likely to reoffend than those given shorter sentences.

People jailed for between two and four years were 7.2 per cent less likely to commit an offence within 12 months of release than those jailed for one to two years.

Interestingly, reoffending rates for those given community sentences – which Mr Clarke and the liberal establishment tell us is the “civilised” way to tackle crime – were the second worst. More than half – 50.6 per cent – committed another crime within 12 months. According to the Ministry of Justice’s chief statistician, Iain Bell, the conclusion is stark: “The longer the sentence there is, the lower the reoffending rate.” Got that? Can we just accept that prison does indeed work and move on?

No, because in the teeth of such emphatic evidence Mr Clarke is determined to reduce prisoner numbers by 3,000 in the belief that it will cut crime.

It won’t. We know that for a fact, because the last time Mr Clarke tried it, in 1992, he presided over a catastrophic increase in crime that was only reversed when he was replaced by Michael Howard who adopted a much tougher sentencing approach.

Mr Clarke seems intent on forcing the courts to issue more community sentences – even though his own department has proved that in more than half of cases they don’t work. Only yesterday the Sentencing Council decreed that the “lowest level” of burglars should escape jail and be given community sentences instead. This is nothing short of a betrayal. One of the primary responsibilities of government is to protect the poor and vulnerable in society.

By being so soft on crime, Mr Clarke and his fellow ministers are failing in that duty.

Sore losers

I’m sure I’m not alone in getting sick of hearing the Lib Dems whingeing over the defeats in the AV referendum and the local elections. Talk about sore losers.

Nick Clegg says he’ll now block the NHS reforms – a bill he signed off personally with enthusiastic Lib Dem support. It’s painful to watch. But the Lib Dems have to decide whether they want to be ideologically pure, popular and in permanent opposition, or to grow up a bit and risk unpopularity by actually achieving something in government.