Bill Carmichael: My judgment on Ken – prison does work

No sooner had he got his legs under the table at the Justice Ministry than he abandoned the Conservatives' solemn election manifesto promise to get tough on crime and build more prisons in favour of the Liberal-Left orthodoxy that society is better served by letting more criminals walk the streets.

Echoing the jargon you will find in any university sociology

department, Mr Clarke this week bemoaned the fact that more and more offenders were being "warehoused" in outdated facilities and he questioned whether this protected the public.

This was music to the ears of the Howard League for Penal Reform and his Lib Dem colleagues in the coalition Government.

But the big problem for the "prison doesn't work" lobby is that there

is no evidence whatsoever to support their contention that letting criminals out of jail will result in a fall in crime – in fact, all the available facts, from this country and elsewhere, point in precisely the opposite direction.

The simple truth, demonstrated time and again around the world, is

this – if you jail more criminals then crime goes down; if you jail fewer criminals then crime goes up.

Of all people Ken Clarke should be aware of this. The last time he was Home Secretary in 1992, he presided over a catastrophic increase in crime with burglaries, car crime, thefts and drug related offences virtually out of control.

This was not entirely the Conservative Government's fault – in fact, crime had rocketed since the 1960s when Labour Home Secretary Roy Jenkins had instituted a lenient sentencing regime that ensured more criminals escaped jail sentences.

But by the 1990s this soft approach to crime had provoked a furious backlash among the public and the Conservatives were forced to act.

Michael Howard replaced Ken Clarke at the Home Office and immediately launched a new get tough policy under the slogan "prison works".

The results were dramatic. Within 12 months the 30-year trend of rising crime was entirely reversed. Between 1995 and 2002 the number of crimes committed in the UK fell from 19.1 million to 12.6 million, according to the British Crime Survey.

This had sociologists – and Mr Clarke – scratching their heads. How is it, they ask, that we are jailing more people, despite the fact that crime is going down?

Only very clever people can be so utterly stupid. In fact, crime is

going down precisely because we are jailing more people. Put at its simplest, little Johnny Scumbag can't burgle your house or mug your granny while he is locked up. Much the same effect has been observed on a larger scale in the US and in virtually every country where a tough sentencing policy has been applied.

Mr Clarke and prison reformers bemoan the high re-offending rates among prisoners. This is undoubtedly true, but all these offenders have

already been sentenced to "tough" community sentences before prison was tried.

The idea that you will stop them reoffending by putting them back on community sentences that conspicuously failed the first time around is absurd. The key difference is that a criminal serving a community sentence is free to continue offending, while a criminal in jail is not.

Mr Clarke also trotted out the tired old argument about money, pointing out that it costs more to put someone in prison – 38,000 a year – than to send a boy to Eton.

But the Home Office's own research shows that the average offender commits 140 crimes a year at a typical cost of 2,000 each – meaning a criminal at liberty costs society an average of 280,000 a year.

So in purely economic terms jailing more criminals is a fantastic deal for the taxpayer.

But the real cost of crime isn't simply economic – it is the fear and ruined lives of law-abiding members of the public.

People like Fiona Pilkington who killed herself and her disabled daughter, Francecca, after a sustained campaign of violent bullying by a gang of local youths in Leicestershire.

The police and the council did almost nothing to help Mrs Pilkington, yet the yobbos who were making her family's life intolerable didn't end up in jail.

What Michael Howard understood, and Ken Clarke has yet to learn, is that you can only protect the most vulnerable in society if you are prepared to condemn criminals a little more, and understand them a

little less.