Crime

The government’s position is that prison does not work. It aims to reduce prison numbers and now Ken Clarke has announced that further savings will be made to the criminal justice budget. The Times reports (£) that Clarke will continue Labour’s policy of closing courts; 103 magistrates courts and 54 county courts will shut up shop. The Tories campaigned against court-closures at the fag-end of the last government; and there is whispered concern around Whitehall and Westminster that the concrete apparatus of justice is already over-stretched. But, savings must be made. Clarke’s closures will save a paltry £15.3 million from the annual £1.1bn budget; the bulk of cuts will come

Michael Howard appeared on today’s Daily Politics and laid into Ken Clarke’s ‘caricature’ of a policy to reduce prison places. There is, Howard argues and John Denham supported him, a correlation between increasing the number of those incarcerated and a fall in crime. In other words, prison still works. Howard criticised Clarke’s ‘rather foolish’ denial of that link. Howard echoes the Spectator’s editorial line that early release endangers society, and that it costs less in real terms to keep criminals in prison. Howard’s off-message critique is the most total I have yet seen, particularly on the statistical case against the government’s position. It is significant that it came from a

So much of the welfare debate is lost in jargon and the numbingly large and depressing numbers. John Bird, founder of The Big Issue, has just been on The Daily Politics and he condensed the specious waffle into plain but evocative sound bites. ‘You don’t have a broken society without a broken system. The usual suspects come in and advise Blair, Brown and now Cameron that what you need is money for the poor. The poor don’t need more money; the poor need more opportunity.’ Bird admitted that prison made him upwardly mobile. He left it being able to read, write and paint, and was given the confidence to pursue

I’ve just flicked on the television in search of fresh disasters. The news that Raoul Moat shot himself when cornered in a kessel is still ‘breaking’. In this heat I’d be surprised if he wasn’t oozing by now, but 24 hour news doesn’t concern itself with such trivialities. The ‘Yours Concerned’ BBC reporter intoned in horror that 2 tasers had been used in the operation.  Now, I wouldn’t arm the officious clown who asked why I was carrying a bottle of Crozes Hermitage through Waterloo station yesterday evening. I oppose the adoption of tasers in anything other than extreme circumstances. But Mr Moat was fairly extreme in my book, given,

The European Court of Human Rights is an essential check on executive excess, but today it has perverted justice. It has halted Abu Hamza’s extradition to the US, where he was to be tried for colluding with al Qaeda. Its view was that Hamza would likely be subject to inhumane and degrading incarceration. In other words, the ECHR has decided that the US prison system is not compatible with the standards agreed by signatories to the European Convention on Human Rights. Fine. Except, of course, it has not. There is a pernicious double standard at work here. Gary McKinnon, the aspergers sufferer who hacked into the Pentagon’s computer systems, is

Along with defence, there’s one other area where rolling back the state doesn’t come naturally to Conservatives: criminal justice. The massive cuts looming on the horizon for the criminal justice system would have been politically toxic for any party to deliver, but for the traditional party of law and order there will be a special discomfort.   Ken Clarke’s speech this morning was much less exciting for the penal reform/abolitionist lobby than the morning papers indicated. Echoing Nick Herbert’s speech to Policy Exchange last week, the Justice Secretary rightly said that that the test of a successful criminal justice system was not simply the number of people you lock up