Crime

One of the Conservative leadership’s worries at the moment is that the party is losing its reputation for being tough on crime. So it won’t welcome today’s Daily Mail splash about how a prisoner was granted permission by Ken Clarke to father a child by artificial insemination.   Now, we don’t know the precise details of the case, meaning that it is hard to come to a firm judgement. But I understand that when he was justice secretary Jack Straw rejected these kind of applications. He was, one familiar with the issue tells me, of the view that prisoners should not be allowed to benefit from non-medically necessary NHS services.

Target culture. It’s a pejorative phrase, and understandably so. As we discovered during the New Labour years, targets designed to encourage good public services can frequently do the opposite — replacing genuine care with box-ticking, and action with bureaucracy. I mention this now because of an article in this week’s Spectator (do subscribe, etc.) by an anonymous Metropolitan Police officer. He describes how a target culture has skewed the work of the force and, in some cases, even the law itself. Here’s one anecdote, which rather sums it all up: “I know of one instance in which a uniformed sergeant stole (or neglected to hand in) some confiscated cannabis. Instead

Despite the focus on the government’s controversial plans to reduce the prison population, the troubled Prison Service continues to cause headaches for Ministers in another way — by failing to get on top of the security problems plaguing the estate In the 1990s, when Michael Howard was in Ken Clarke’s position, the concern of ministers was escaping inmates. The Prison Service has made huge strides on this, despite ongoing issues with the open prison estate and day-release of some inmates. But now the ever-present problem is lax internal security and especially drug-infestation. The jailing this week, for two years, of a prison officer based at Feltham Young Offenders Institution is

The name ‘Ken Clarke’ and the word ‘sacking’ are inseparable to the chattering classes at the moment, but so was it ever thus. There are signs though that the normally insouciant Clarke has been shaken on this occasion. He has given an interview in defence of his contentious prison reforms to the Times this morning (£). In a clear message to concerned voters, Tory backbenchers and sceptical government colleagues, he denies that he is ‘soft on crime’. For example, he will tighten community sentences: “I want them to be more punitive, effective and organised. Unpaid work should require offenders to work at a proper pace in a disciplined manner rather

Labour’s cartography department has been hard at work all weekend to produce this. It is, lest you haven’t heard Yvette Cooper today, an “interactive web-map” of the job losses announced by police forces so far, all across the country. You can interact with it in ways that include clicking to view a larger version. So far as web campaigning goes, this is probably fertile ground for the Opposition. No one likes the idea of more crime — and “more crime” is often conflated with “fewer bobbies” in the public debate. Yet Labour’s point is diluted, somewhat, by one simple fact: that their former Home Secretary refused to guarantee that police

Libby Brooks’ piece in The Guardian today is shameful. Writing about the violence that followed last weekend’s march, she  argues that the ‘relevant question is not whether or how to condemn those acts – but if any coherent agenda lies behind them and how important it is for that to sit neatly with the agenda of the whole’. She even quotes approvingly the idea that the violence can be beneficial as it might push the government to do a deal with the moderate elements of the movement and wants us to remember that ‘the vast majority of damage on Saturday was sustained by property, not persons (84 people were treated