Civitas Blog

Crime in Middlesbrough is nearly twice the national average so it is surprising to see the police there have the time to detain members of the public for crimes that do not exist. Perhaps they need reminding that crimes (in a free country, at least), with few exceptions, involve theft or damage of property or the harming of another person. [via Samizdata]

With due credit to ‘Mr Eugenides’ whose frequent use of colourful metaphors renders him unsuitable to be linked to here, we can see the level of conviction with which the government is leading on criminal justice.

May 2000 - Straw plans `short, sharp jail shock' for young

March 2008 - Too many short sentences - Straw

The Daily Mail reports that one in eight entries on the police’s growing DNA database is incorrectly inputted, threatening to associate the DNA signature of a criminal with the record of an innocent member of the public. In the future innocent people could be arrested on the basis of an error made by a data entry clerk, a possibility imagined before in Terry Gilliam’s 1985 film Brazil, set in a totalitarian state with an ever-bungling bureaucracy.

The problem is that even if the government could sort out these problems, DNA evidence will never be a magic bullet to save our criminal justice system. Part of why it is so successful at the moment is that it is still a comparatively novel technology that average criminals have yet to learn to exploit. If it comes to be relied on in the majority of cases, dispersing other people’s DNA around a crime scene, in order to put police off the scent, will become much more commonplace and evidence based on it will become just another thing for lawyers and juries to examine, trying to tease out the facts from mere conjecture. To make criminal justice effective, as discussed last week, we need a system that concentrates on reducing crime rather than "managing" offenders.

A worrying case has emerged this morning. A shopkeeper managed to fend off an attempted robbery by stabbing the assailant with his own knife. From the details available, this response was proportionate since the shopkeeper suffered wounds in the struggle as well (it was clear that the robber was prepared to carry out his threat to attack). Yet the shopkeeper now may face charges of murder, manslaughter or assault, pending a review by the CPS. While it is proper for the police to investigate deaths along these lines, unless there is more to this case than meets the eye, this is a highly disproportionate response to a citizen protecting his life and property.

A terrorised pensioner died of a heart attack during an attack on his home in a dispute over a parking space at a supermarket. What makes this story especially worrying is that a policeman (and friend of the defendants) traced the 79-year-old by his car registration number, using the police national computer database. There is no word in the news on what legal action the policeman will face, which is strange considering that accessory to manslaughter would be appropriate.

There has been speculation in the press that the National Offender Management Service, brought into being only three years ago, is going to be scrapped in an attempt to insulate the newly formed Ministry of Justice from the incompetence of the past. NOMS is a fairly typical example of government failure: costing billions of pounds and barely making a dent in Britain’s obese re-offending figures while antagonising public service unions for no good reason.

When the government fails to fulfill its minimal responsibilities, it is the poor that will suffer while the rich can usually find an alternative. In a typical case in the UK, for years, even as average fees have been rising, the number of families seeking out independent education has been growing steadily. There it is because a minimal amount of discipline and teaching has not been available in many areas of state education for some time.

Now, (via BOM), we learn that a far more basic government service, protection from crime, has fallen to such a level that the richer streets of North London, Primrose Hill in particular, are beginning to invest in independent security forces. Pity the other inhabitants of Camden who cannot afford to opt out of state police protection.

Last week, Alcohol Concern, ‘the National Agency on Alcohol Misuse’, managed to generate a significant amount of media coverage with its recommendation to ‘make it illegal to provide alcohol to anyone under the age of 15.’ The reasoning behind this was that since unsupervised consumption of alcohol is spiralling, along with associated anti-social behaviour, among young people, the natural solution is to imprison parents who offer a thimble of wine to their child at the dinner table.

When faced with that as a consequence of their proposal on the BBC’s Today programme, Alcohol Concern’s spokesperson argued that the change in the law was still necessary in order to ‘send a message’. I am not sure what sort of message about this society would be sent out if Jewish Passover services (where every family member is encouraged to drink a traditional sweet red wine throughout the evening) were raided by the police, but I doubt the delinquents in town centres will see the relevance to them. The alternative 'message', that such laws won't be enforced to the letter so best to work out one's own interpretation of justice would be the likely unintended consequence.

'Smith!' screamed the shrewish voice from the telescreen. '6079 Smith W.! Yes, you! Bend lower, please! You can do better than that. You're not trying. Lower, please! That's better, comrade. Now stand at ease, the whole squad, and watch me.'

A sudden hot sweat had broken out all over Winston's body. His face remained completely inscrutable. Never show dismay! Never show resentment! A single flicker of the eyes could give you away.

The government is expanding its scheme of ‘talking’ CCTV Cameras to various town centres around the country.

John Reid, in honour of little known and even lesser practiced ‘Safer Internet Day’, has launched another barrage of verbal torpedoes over the issue of sex offenders using the Internet. The plan is to force released sex offenders to register their online identities (email addresses and usernames) with the government so that their communications with others including children can be tracked and dangerous behaviour ‘flagged’ before anything in the real world takes place. Unfortunately, both the strategy and implementation of this place seems to be based on little more than one or two ‘Paedofinder General’ sketches from the television series Monkey Dust.

If it is one thing that the Government is eager to keep in the latest fads and fashions, it is the criminal justice system. In fact, it seems like only yesterday that the last round of changes came in under the Police and Justice Act. You could be forgiven for that nagging feeling as it was only last week. The very morning after, the Serious Crime Bill was published as it went for an initial House of Lords reading. With another, so far unpublished, Criminal Justice Bill due in the spring, the government really is spoiling us. Confused? The Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) certainly are as they are still talking about a ‘Serious and Organisated Crime Bill’ [sic] in their press release (via Samizdata), yet this went through Parliament in 2005!

Should Pete Doherty ever find himself banged up for possessing hard drugs, he would soon discover that incarceration had not remotely put them beyond his reach. This is especially so, should he have been incarcerated north of the border.

According to a report in yesterday’s Times, so easy has it become for inmates in Scottish prisons to gain access to illict hard drugs while inside them, and so awash with drugs have they become, that they are shortly all to be given personal drug-taking kits, complete with syringes, swabs, filers, and a sharps disposal box.

I was only surprised to read that a gram or two of heroin or coke is not be thrown for good measure.

Thank goodness that, for his part in the 9/11 attack on the Trade Towers, Zacarias Moussaoui was tried and sentenced in the US rather than here. Had he received a life sentence here, then he would have been back in flight-school before you could say Charles Clarke, let alone Jack … Straw or David Blunkett.

Were Moussaoui to have been imprisoned here for life, then, surely, to make room for another convict it would not have been long before his sentence was commuted. After that, he would have been released into the community rather than deported to obviate his need to seek asylum to avoid deportation, thereby risking the Government no longer being able to boast proudly about having met its target of reduced asylum applications.

I kid ye not, as the late lamented Frankie Howard used to say.

According to a letter in today’s Times, among whose signatories figures that of a former chief inspector of prisons, current over-crowding in prisons is so acute as to deny prisoners opportunity for any form of education while there, save of the most basic kind to which priority, apparently, is currently being given.

Some might be tempted to retort by saying: ‘Tough, prison should no more be a university than it should be a vacation resort’. While true enough, such a response might dispose too quickly of the issue raised by the letter.

Jean Charles de Menezes was neither white nor British born. Yet, rightly there has been no shortage of media coverage of his cold-blooded summary execution by police last July in a London underground carriage.

His killing occurred the day after a ‘feigned’ multiple suicide bombing on the same transportation system that had been staged whilst the shockwaves of the real suicide bombings of the 7th were still at their height.

One reason for the vast media interest there has been in the police execution of this perfectly innocent man has been the profound, and still unanswered, questions it has raised about the propriety of police conduct and procedure, both before, at the time of, and subsequent to the killing, at every level of seniority of the police force.

These questions go right up to the very top of the tree on which Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Ian Blair continues to remain perched. His grip there seems ever more precarious, especially since the long-awaited results of the IPCC enquiry into the shooting have now gone to the CPS for consideration whether criminal charges should be pressed against any of the police involved in the shooting. .

For Sir Ian to have accused the media of institutional racism as he did yesterday -- accusations he repeated today at the very same time as he apologised for what he now admits was insensitivity in having previously suggesed media coverage of the killings of school-girls Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman had been unduly and disproportionately large on account of their skin colour -- is really a case of insult being added to injury.

You have to hand it to Tony Blair. The American entertainer, Fifty Cent, has nothing on our Prime Minister as a performer.

On Tuesday of this week, Tone-da-Drone, as I now like mentally to refer to our consummate home-grown rap artist, unveiled a swathe of proposed initiatives designed to curb street-crime and disorderly families.

They join the already swollen collection of failed previous ones, like ASBO’s, designed to curb the same problems.

Bearing, surely not unintentionally, the curiously apt acronym of ‘RAP’, the Prime Minister chose Swindon as the unlikely venue for launching his much-vaunted ‘Respect Action Plan’.

Does his choice of these terms by means of which to characterise the domestic policy initiatives he wishes to make his swan song as PM, suggest the former rock-n-roll enthusiast has spent too much time listening to his children’s confiscated CD’s or watching MTV with them?

In any case, and much more importantly, just how respectful of Parliament was the PM’s choice of venue to unveil the plan?

Respec’ Tone once again, this time for the manifest contempt you have shown Parliament in choosing Swindon as the place at which to unleash upon the nation your latest RAP!

The Times reports today the launch of a new campaign designed to educate children about the dangers of gun crime. It has been launched amidst mounting police concern about the increasing numbers and ever earlier age of black children who have taken to carrying guns.

Speaking yesterday at the launch of the campaign, London’s Mayor, Ken Livingstone, used the occasion to condemn rap music stars for having glamorised violence and promoted the use of weapons. With these groups firmly in mind, he is reported to have said people in the public eye should consider what role models they set.

A few months ago (Guardian 4th August 2005), the Mayor publicly defended the Muslim cleric, Sheikh Qaradawi, being allowed into this country to address young British Muslims, despite the cleric having publicly supported suicide bombings of civilians in Israel, something which the Mayor also went on to condemn.

Describing the Sheikh as ‘one of the world's most eminent Muslim religious leaders’, the Mayor claimed denying the cleric entry would show disrespect to British Muslims who he claimed revered him and only serve to increase the number of alienated fanatics.

The Sheikh is a public figure and role model for his admirers. Why should his alleged high standing among them be thought to license his being able to glorify one form of morally unjustifiable violence, when the high standing of rap artists among young British blacks is claimed precisely why they should desist from glorifying another form of unjustified violence?

Won’t the disrespect shown by the Mayor to young British blacks in condemning their cultural heroes merely alienate them and thereby increase their numbers prepared to carry guns?

The badly scarred and understandably sad-looking face of a twelve-year old Sheffield schoolgirl stares reproachfully from a photograph on the front page of today’s Times. The poor girl acquired her disfiguring injuries after she was savagely set upon by a knife-wielding classmate whom the previous day the brave victim of the attack had tried to stop bullying a third schoolmate.

Earlier this year, Secretary of State for Education, Ruth Kelly, set up a ‘behaviour task force’ to make proposals about how to tackle the growing problem of classroom bullying and disorder which it is due to publish today. It was, apparently and welcomingly, asked to adopt a long-overdue and badly-needed zero-tolerance approach to the problem.

We should, however, not hold our hopes too high. For we have long been promised so much by the present government and given so little it is difficult to believe we shall not this time receive only yet more brave words that amount to little in practice.

By way of illustration of the current tragic gap between rhetoric and reality today in all matters to do with schooling today, consider what was said in its last Ofsted report about the approach of the victim’s school towards instilling good behaviour in pupils:

‘The school looks after its pupils well…. The school successfully integrates many pupils with challenging behaviour, and those who have been excluded from schools…. A programme for personal, social and health education is well organised and effectively taught. … Moral education is good. Expectations regarding behaviour are clear, and pupils are full aware of the difference between right and wrong.’

Now, we all know that one swallow does not a summer make. But by the same token so do we that it takes only one rotten apple to spoil a barrel. Moreover, it simply defies belief to suppose the attack was a totally isolated incident or that a twelve-year old girl would be carrying a knife to school with the intention or willingness to use it as she did had her doing so not been to some extent in keeping with the entire culture of that school, if not at its official classroom level, then at its unofficial level in the playground.

(There’s a word whose literal meaning harks back to earlier more civilised times and serves as a standing indictment of the harsh and brutal reality that place has all too commonly and tragically become today.)

But the rot goes well beyond the disturbed and deprived family backgrounds which are such fertile incubators of the many disorderly and disturbed children who attend today’s schools. It goes right up to the top of the educational establishment. Consider, for example, what the same Ofsted report said about that same school’s approach towards moral education:

‘Moral education is good…. When moral decisions are to be made, pupils are taught to think these through from action to consequence…. Moral issues are debated as they arise in lessons, for example, global warming and its consequences, refugees and persecution.’

Lord above! If ever there was a moral decision to be made by a school child, it is not whether the G8 countries should adopt some protocol about reducing carbon emissions or whether there should be a law prohibiting incitement to religious hatred. It is whether they school bring into school a knife today or any other with the intent or preparedness to use it.

Admittedly, this moral issue is by no means as straightforward as might at first sight appear. Were school environments entirely orderly and civil, the question should simply not arise for a child of whether to carry a knife to school. It does, however, when schools have been turned into blackboard jungles into which children must daily venture in fear and trembling of being assaulted. Then, whether to carry a knife to school does become a genuine moral issue for them.

Having said all that, it seems Ofsted, along with the entire educational establishment of this country, has got the moral focus all wrong if it and they should think moral education in schools should be about fostering in their pupils the ability to debate such issues as the ethics of global-warming, rather than about instilling in them basic common decency, as well as attempting to develop their abilty to think for themselves about how to be decent as well as their wanting to be, when all about them there is so much moral chaos, disorder and unruliness.

School, as we know, is no moral substitute for the home and, unless their pupils' home environment is stable and nurturing, it is an uphill struggle for teachers to turn out morally decent products.

Perhaps, then, more emphasis should be given in schools and in the wider community at large on the value of stable homes and family-life. ‘Oh!’ we will be told ‘to do that will stigmatise those children not fortunate enough to have been born into one!’

Balderdash! If the time has come for society to adopt a policy of zero-tolerance towards classroom disorder and bullying, it has also come for it to get tough on the causes of classroom disorder and bullying. Of these unsettled and unstable home-lives must be a principal, if not the single biggest, cause.

All those 'sixties feminists who back then championed the break-up of the two-parent family because, so they claimed, this would liberate women from domestic violence should be made to take a long hard look at the photograph of that poor school-girl’s face and made to answer the simple question of whether their sisters’ liberation from the oppressive patriarchal family was worth her scars inflicted by a girl not a boy as well as all the other injuries and indignities suffered by all other victims of violent crime today.

In seeking to revive a culture of respect, Tony Blair has got it all wrong by thinking it can be restored by him and his like constantly banging on about how ill-behaved young people are today.

So said yesterday Tom Wylie, Chief Executive of the government-funded National Youth Agency, in a speech reported in today's Times.

Instead, Mr Wylie is reported as having said, the way in which young people should be taught to respect others is for their elders to show them greater respect than they are shown by Mr Blair and other government ministers who constantly berate them for being yobs.

After last week’s Cabinet meeting in which the Government finalised its legislative programme for the forthcoming Parliament, Prime Minister Blair made a widely-reported speech. In it, he declared that, among the objectives of his new term of office, paramount would be the introduction of new legislative measures designed to curb growing yobbishness and unruliness, particularly among the young.

Blair characterised this element of his programme as one designed to restore a culture of respect. Having been quick to admit that the objective was not one any government could be expected to achieve single-handedly, he called for a debate on how best others could join with government in helping to achieve it.

Judged by the column inches that have been devoted to this subject in the press since his speech, Blair’s call for such a debate can be judged a resounding success. This is more than is likely to be able to be said for the legislative measures announced in the Queen’s Speech to tackle the problem, according to much of this comment.

A growing consensus is emerging that Blair’s proposed measures to tackle unruliness will prove of little effect or even counter-productive. This is because, so claim his critics of which I am one, they do nothing to reverse the chief underlying cause of the unruliness. This has been the steady collapse of the two-parent family which best socialises children to enjoy the greatest chance of staying out of trouble.

There is another flaw in Blair’s remarks to which, so far as I am aware, commentators have yet to draw attention. If allowed to stand uncorrected, it threatens to vitiate whatever measures his government should take to curb unruliness informed by it.

American sociologist Charles Murray wrote an article for The Sunday Times in 2004, soon to be published in book form by Civitas, in which he argued the case for retributive justice. The principle of retributive justice is that the criminal justice system should punish criminals for the harm they have inflicted on their victims, and that the punishment should be proportional to the crime. This is the primary aim of criminal justice. Not reforming criminals or even preventing further crimes by incarceration. Both of these things may happen, of course, and there is much to be said for them, but they are secondary aims. Murray also argues for reforms to the way in which trials are conducted. He believes that former charges and convictions should be made known to the jury if they are for similar offences. He also argues that the system needs to draw a firm distinction between those he calls Outlaws and Citizens. Habitual criminals (Outlaws) should not be treated as if they have the same rights as the law-abiding (Citizens). Citizens who are threatened by criminals should be able to retaliate in any way they deem necessary to defend themselves.

Anyone with the recent misfortune of having had to take a journey by bus in any of our cities at the end of the school day, when their streets are filled with the teeming ranks of their all-too-frequently ill-mannered, foul-mouthed, and indecorous charges, will have had no need to brave a visit to the apparently still wilder reaches of our out-of-town shopping malls to know a deep-seated pathology currently afflicts all too many of our youngsters today.

Yesterday, having somewhat belatedly recalled his promise as Shadow Home Secretary to get tough in office on the causes of crime, Prime Minister Blair took a pot-shot at those whom he declared to be the true causes of the waywardness of so many of the country's children today -- their parents.

The Prime Minister singled parents out for special mention among the causes of the rowdiness and unruliness of children, by berating them for having failed to impose adequate discipline at home and to instil in them due respect for others.

Having so identified what he considered the principal cause of their unruly behaviour, Blair was quick to disclaim any power to improve it. ‘I cannot solve all these problems… I cannot … raise someone children’s for them.’

Well said, Mr Blair: you certainly can’t. Indeed, as I recall, you too seem to have experienced the same difficulty many parents have in raising their children to behave with proper decorum in the case of some of your own off-spring.

The crime figures released yesterday can be put in context by referring to the Civitas Crime Briefing.

Here is the third voter briefing: on crime.

Among the very first acts carried out by Sir Ian Blair in his new job as Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police was to change their logo. At the cost of several thousand pounds drawn from his budget, the word 'together' was added making the logo now read, 'Working Together for a Safer London’.

Londoners, I am sure, will now all be able to sleep more soundly in their beds together, safe in the knowledge of Sir Ian's bold initiative.

At the time he announced it, Sir Ian remarked “The word you’ll hear a lot from me is ‘together’”.

The Commissioner has certainly lived up to his promise. In an open letter sent to all Londoners at the start of his appointment, Sir Ian remarked, after declaring one of his central aims to be ‘to build stronger links with Londoners’, ‘If we are to be successful, we must work together with you.’

Few at the time could have appreciated just how much a man of his word Sir Ian would turn out to be, or how literal-minded.

According to the British Crime Survey, overall crime is falling and, according to police records, it is probably stable after allowing for changes in the method of recording. In any event, since the mid-1990s, under both the BCS and police records, crime has fallen. This still leaves us with the fourth highest crime rate among the other 39 European countries covered by the Council of Europe’s, European Sourcebook of Crime, and it only means that crime is ten times what it was in the 1950s instead of eleven or twelve times.

Why has it come down? And can the police claim credit? There are two main reasons.

First, some high-volume crimes have fallen because private householders have spent a lot of their own money defending themselves. The 17-country International Crime Victims Survey found in 2000 that a higher proportion of people in England and Wales had burglar alarms than any other country in the survey: 34% compared with an average of 15%. We had also spent more on special door locks. Some 69% had such locks, second only to the Netherlands where the figure was 70%. The 17-country average was only 44%. The Home Office estimated in 2000 that, for every stolen car, £370 had been spent on security and another £320 on insurance, a total of £690. For every domestic burglary about £330 had been spent on defensive devices and another £100 on insurance, £430 in total. In England and Wales in 2000 about £4.9 billion was spent on security, or about £200 per year for every household. (The Economic and Social Costs of Crime, Home Office Research Study 217, 2000.)

Second, detection rates have been falling but imprisonment rates and sentence length have been rising. In 1951, 47% of indictable offences were detected by the police. By 1991 the rate had fallen to 29% and the latest figure is 23% in 2003. (Criminal Statistics 2003, Table 1.1) In 1992 crown courts sentenced 47% of those convicted of indictable offences to immediate custody. In 2002 they sentenced 66% to immediate custody. Over the same period, average sentence length increased from 21.1 months to 27.8 months. (Criminal Statistics 2002, Table 4.16.) Partly as a result of these changes in sentencing , the prison population has risen since 1993, from about 46,000 to around 74,000 today. The incapacitation effect of locking up repeat offenders goes a long way towards explaining the fall in crime since the mid-1990s. Criminals can’t break into your house while they are behind bars.

Since police detection rates have fallen over the period from 1991 to 2003, it is not easy to attribute the fall in crime to police success. On the contrary, if the police had played their part more effectively we might have got crime down even more – perhaps to the extent that we no longer had the fourth highest crime rate in Europe.

I am in the United States, and I have heard only indirectly about the recent edition of BBC Newsnight that dealt with crime and policing in London. I understand that, just as, according to the press, Civitas's Cultures and Crimes aroused the 'fury' of the Association of Chief Police Officers (a little intimidating to people of nervous temperament, that, I should think), so the Newsnight item that used Cultures and Crimes has provoked Mr Livingstone into going or threatening to go to the Broadcasting Complaints Commission about the staff who reported and produced it.

Labour's White Paper A Mayor and Assembly for London proposed in 1998 that oversight for the Metropolitan Police should be transferred from the Home Secretary and Parliament to a Metropolitan Police Authority (MPA). In July 2000 the MPA came into existence, replacing the arrangement that that had lasted for the previous 170 years.

Of the 23 members of the MPA, 12 are appointed by Mayor Livingstone, and Mayor Livingstone sets the police budget, which then goes to the London Assembly. There are seven 'independent' members of the MPA, one of whom is appointed directly by the Home Secretary. In 1999 the Greater London Act made the Metropolitan Police Area the same as the area of Mayor Livingstone's jurisdiction, i.e. the area covered by the 32 London boroughs.

We have just come across a website by a police officer (writing under a pseudonym) that offers dry, and often amusing, commentary on the leadership decisions of today's generation of sociology-trained chief constables. Well worth a regular look.

A new Government study, the Crime and Justice Survey, has found that nearly a quarter (24%) of males aged 14-17 were serious or prolific offenders, committing crimes such as car theft, burglary and violent assaults at least six times (and usually far more) in the previous year.

The social-science evidence points strongly to the influence of parents as the chief underlying cause of juvenile crime. In England, 27 per cent of prison inmates had been in care and 47 per cent had run away from home as a child. But it's not just broken families. Criminal parents are much more likely to raise criminal offspring: a recent survey found that 43 per cent of prisoners had family members who had been convicted and 35 per cent had a family member who had been in jail. But family breakdown is important, especially when parents contradict each other - thereby providing no clear moral lead - or compete for affection by being lax with their children. Such conflict is more likely in disrupted families, when one parent is absent, or when a new partner or step-parent appears.

Over a quarter of children are now being raised by only one parent and just over 40% of children are now born outside marriage.

Most people don't commit crimes because they think it's wrong, and parents play the dominant role in providing their children with a conscience. Because parenting is a difficult task, if one parent must do the job of two it becomes more difficult still. Of course, a lone parent may be able to raise a child successfully if he or she is not naturally pre-disposed to crime, and the school and wider community are supportive. But, single parents have less chance of success, particularly when confronted by an inherently difficult child, and still more so when they live in a disorderly neighbourhood. In such localities, boys who lack the guidance of a law-abiding father often turn to other role models. Perhaps they will be keen on football and the local team manager will have a good influence on them, or maybe they will look up to the local car thief or drug dealer.

Prisons are overcrowded; so the Government has come up with a novel way to deal with the shortage of prison accommodation. According to a report in today's Times, judges are to be forbidden from imposing prison sentences unless they have first checked there is enough room to accommodate the convicted offender.

The Home Secretary has announced that the law governing the degree of force that householders can use to protect themselves against criminals will not be changed. Instead, the government will run a campaign to tell us what the appropriate response should be. At the same time, a private members bill introduced by Roger Gale MP to allow householders to use whatever degree of force they consider necessary against intruders has failed after being described by Home Office Minister, Fiona Mactaggart, as a recipe for a "spiral of violence and retaliation". The bill reflected the preferences of a poll of listeners to the Radio 4 Today programme.

Once again, an attempt to reform the criminal justice system in a way that reflects the concerns of ordinary citizens has been defeated by those who run the system, and who are convinced that they know what we need better than we do.

One of the reasons for the high level of dissatisfaction with the police and the courts is the feeling of absolute powerlessness that we have in this country. Nothing we think makes any difference, as the criminal justice system is above politics. This sounds good, in the sense that we have always prided ourselves on having a system that can’t be manipulated by party politicians to their own short-term advantage, but in reality it means that it is beyond the ability of voters – citizens – to influence it. In the USA people elect their district attorneys, some judges and, of course, their mayors, for whom the appointment of the police chief is one of the most important decisions they will make. If crime is felt to be out of control, a lot of people are in danger of losing their jobs. In Britain, the authorities can just tell us that the ‘fear of crime’ is the problem, and that crime is really falling. Nobody believes this, but so what?

The situation is made worse by the rock-solid consensus amongst the political parties that no radical reforms are needed. A new initiative here, a bit of extra funding there, is felt to be the answer. Whichever way you vote at the general election, it is unlikely that anything much is going to be done about crime, unless the political landscape suffers a seismic shift.

Various Home Office spokesmen continue to deny recent changes in police practice have contributed in any way to a massive increase in violent crime recently witnessed in this country. They do so by citing a recent minor fall in the crime-rate as evidence violent crime has not risen, and hence as evidence the new methods are effective.

This reply overlooks two things.

Mr Ron Bramwell has asked me this question in connection with my article "The sensational and the trivialising press":

"What was driving the public housing planners of the 1960s? Was it money from builders, or voters?"

It is a long, long story.

Part of what drove the planners of that time was sincere do-goodism. They knew best. An old friend of mine wrote a book at the time about the Newcastle planners. The title of Jon Gower Davies's book exactly caught the point: The Evangelistic Bureaucrat. A German book was entitled The Drawing-Board Preachers. My books at that time were about the Sunderland planners.

The planners were not out on a limb. Most people of woolly good will lived outside the slum clearance areas. Among the leading lights of the New Left in London (many of them ex-public school boys), very rapidly joined by the middle-class Marxist and Trotskyist students of the new universities, there was the ridiculous idea that working class life in northern England in the 1960s was accurately described by Engels in his Condition of the Working Classes in England in 1844. (In the early 1890s Engels himself had said that those conditions no longer existed.) In those days, town planning used to head the list of worth-while professionals among students (there were beginning to be a lot of them in the 1960s), so the planners were bouyed up by that.

In People and Planning I go through the history of Sunderland's housing and neighbourhoods from the growth of the town as a great shipbuilding and coal-mining centre in the middle nineteenth century to the 1970s.

Until the 1960s people who desperately wanted to be rehoused were being cleared from their crowded, multi-family houses, with few amenities in squalid neighbourhoods. They couldn't get into council houses fast enough. In the 1920s, 1930s and 1950s families on the new estates would proudly display their new homes, modern schools and new other community buildings and shops to their admiring working-class relatives from the older parts of the town.

It was only in the 1960s that the planners began to bite into respectable working-class neighbourhoods--great communities--and use against people perfectly capable of looking after their own homes, and increasingly owner-occupiers of them, the compulsory purchase laws that had been intended for use against slum landlords.

The estates were further and further away from the big shops and leisure focuses of the town centre. Suddenly, prefabricated tower blocks made their appearance. The local authority allocated dwellings on the basis of "need". "We can't have her rattling about the place like a pea in a pod." People who had a couple of spare rooms where their grandchildren could come and stay found that they had no chance of spare space if their house was demolished.

Then "need" began to mean preference for unmarried girls who were pregnant or had a small child or children. Within three of four years the uncontrolled children were the bane of the housing estates. People who expected neighbours to respect one another's privacy and property moved out, or would not move in. A vicious circle was created. You stood a better chance of a council house if you didn't get married. (That's not a red-top myth. I looked at all this at the time, as a full-time researcher, in the housing offices of the old Sunderland Corporation.)

The inculcated idea that a man's duty primary adult role was to live under the same roof with the mother of his children, and provide by his own work for each child for at least the first sixteen years of its life, was increasingly redundant. Young men were free to drink and fornicate as they liked. It took many years before drugs and the crime that was needed to support drugs took a firm hold. Nobody in those days dreamed that it would spiral as deeply as it did. Perfectly sincere, gruff old Labour politicians, many of them the salt of the earth, were on automatic pilot that more and more council housing was a good thing, and that the very few "bits of lasses" who "got themselves into trouble" should be treated kindly. The very few.

Labour men and women active in an industrial provincial town like Sunderland, with hardly any contact with or sympathy for the advanced ideas of the emerging libertarian Left of the student movements, didn't think there could ever be more than very few. Their world was a world of the universality and permanence in civilised societies (yes, they were as yet untouched by shame about English social institutions) of what everybody knew was the best way to handle sex, companionship and mutual aid, and the upbringing of children: namely, conception within marriage and life-long monogamy.

Men worked hard and long in the forges, foundries, shipyards, glassworks, shipyards and the pit. Women worked hard and long with the children; they worked hard and long in their homes' tiny sculleries, and over the poss-tubs, mangles and coal-fired boilers in the little brick outhouses in their back yards. But there was not much trace of the idea that women had the worse half of the family's grinding existence, and that the institution of marriage had failed.

That they would be the instruments of the family's destruction rarely occurred to any of these old Labour councillors. The prediction would have horrified them.

But--and this is why you commented as you did, I suppose--the planners and councillors who pursued policies of slum-clearing and rehousing were backed up by the people who made money in all the private professions and businesses surrounding demolition and construction. The planners were backed up by the myriad traditional local government professionals whose jobs came to depend on the endless momentum of demolition and rehousing schemes: the quantity surveyors, the architects, the public health officials, the lawyers in the Town Clerk's department, and all their support staffs.

Eventually they were backed up by the extraordinary variety of new professionals and pseudo-professionals in national and local government, and the academics and pseudo-academics who taught them, who emerged to service the burgeoning failures of the new prize winning estates and Corbusieran "machines for living in".

Again, they were, by and large, decent ordinary people who'd done pretty well in the job market. Their intentions were, by and large, benign.

But the damage they were doing didn't affect them adversely, and they knew (at least intuitively) that if the damage stopped being inflicted they'd be on the dole. In their cocoon of self-righteousness and often their superciliousness, they were quite happy to continue "doing good".

In the late 1960s the planners and the public health people produced "scientific surveys" of the housing districts that showed that the houses were technically unfit for human habitation, and physically incapable of lasting another five or ten years.

The surveys were self-contradictory bodged-up balderdash. (You'll have to read People and Planning and Public Participation and Planners' Blight to see the evidence for that, and to see whether or not you agree that the evidence produced there justifies these harsh remarks.) But in the planners' and health officials' eyes it did not matter. They were in the right in their policies of clearing these slums. The system required them to justify their policy by facts. But what did a few facts about the attitudes and homes of working-class people here or there have to do with their grand designs? "Everybody knew" that slum-clearance was a good thing. That's what they'd been taught; that's what their colleagues took for granted; and that's what their advancement in their profession depended on.

There was plenty of petty corruption. Housing and planning councillors were often in the pockets of the better educated and better paid senior officials. But the corruption was, say, bottles of whisky at Christmas from contractors to officers, and drinks bought at conferences by the officers for the councillors, for which the sozzled councillors were sufficiently grateful. The officers weren't doing anything they didn't want them to do.

In the later 1960s the planners nationwide were backed to the hilt by a Newcastle politician, T. Dan Smith, a principled Trotskyist in his younger days. I have no doubt that he was sincere enough in thinking he was doing good. But he was so arrogant in his self-conception, that he was enlightened and right and ordinary people were backward and wrong, that to oil the wheels of progress he spread corruption far and wide through local government.

Wisely, he kept his home base in Newcastle relatively free from corruption.

Corruption was not more than a petty problem in Sunderland (as far as I know, but I've led a sheltered life, as I have admitted in other articles) under an incorruptible and highly competent politician who took over as Council leader in the later 1960s. Charles Slater.

In County Durham corruption in connection with town-planning projects was rife. It was originally exposed by Private Eye in an article entitled 'Handy Andy'.

Smith operated by appointing "consultants" to his various "public relations" firms. Depending on the size of the local authority and the influence of the councillor, he'd appoint him or her (nearly always him in those days) as a consultant at £500 or more, running into the thousands of pounds a year or as a single fee.

Smith was always in the clear. The Chairman of the Housing or Planning or Management Committee would do what Smith was paying him for. Legally he had to declare an interest as being on Smith's payroll. If the errant councillor was exposed, Smith could say, and did say, "How shocking that he did not declare his interest! I naturally assumed he would do so. His misconduct has nothing do with me".

When a prominent Labour leader of a London borough, influential throughout the whole of the south-east of the country, was prosecuted for taking a bribe in this form from Smith, he was found guilty. When Smith was prosecuted for bribing him at a subsequent trial (he managed to have them separated) he was found innocent of bribing him. That's how well it worked.

He was the darling of the Department of the Environment. He once stayed at a London hotel, waiting for the call he expected to receive from Harold Wilson to join his new Cabinet. This was at a time when rumours were swirling around him. But the rule of public life that had prevailed since the middle of the nineteenth century, that the nature of corruption meant that the appearance of impropriety was sufficient to disqualify a person from public office, was being replaced by the assumption that a public official was innocent until his was proven guilty. If anything marked the beginning of the degeneration of British culture, that did.

Practice did not, of course, always follow the rule. The Marconi affair, cash for peerages, police malpractice and other scandals occur as quickly to my mind as to the mind of any reader. But by the middle of the twentieth century, English politics, English public adminstration, and English public life generally were probably as clean as in any large society that has ever existed.

Anyone interested in this side of the matter can look at the Smith affair, and contrast it with the the Sidney Stanley affair, as dealt with in the report of the Lynskey Tribunal, and as dealt with by both Churchill and Attlee when the Lynskey Tribunal's report came before the House of Commons.

The whole thing blew up in everybody's face when a Pontefract architect called John Poulson went bankrupt. When his documents were subpoenaed, hundreds of notes on scrappy bits of paper were unearthed, implicating dozens of politicians, from Westminster to the obscurest pit village on the Durham coalfield. Poulson had kept them for quasi-blackmail purposes. If he went down, they'd all go down with him, so they'd better protect him.

For months, as the scandals unravelled, Smith was supported by important sections of the national broadsheet press. (Guess which.)

He was eventually jailed.

Ronan Point collapsed in east London. People hated the maisonnettes and blocks of flats. Whereas in the 1960s working-class communities had united in opposing the plans to demolish their houses, in the 1980s they were turning out to cheer the dynamiting of the flats into which they had been rehoused.

So it was all bad do's. But it wasn't driven by "builders and money". It was driven by good intentions.

The point is, that if the good intentions had meant that Smith lost money (he ended up on "Millionaires' Row" in Newcastle, and the Rolls Royce of this poor lad from Wallsend had one of the first customised plates--was it T Dan 1?); or had meant that the building industry fueled with enormous taxpayers subsidies lost money; or that local government officers were being sacked instead of hired as fast as the machinery of government could manage; or that university, polytechnic and training-college posts in social work were being curtailed instead of vastly expanded, then the effects of the good intentions would have been subjected to scrutiny by more than a handful of extremely unpopular academics (as one critic wrote) "from their fastnesses on the banks of the Wear". (Note from Jon Gower Davies: "Heh! What about the fastnesses on the banks of the Tyne? I was just as unpopular as you.")

Go to the top of the class the person who sees any resemblance between this phenomenon and the dismemberment of the institution of life-long monogamy. If divorce meant a halving of the houses being needed instead of a doubling of them when the former united household splits into two; and if only half the washing machines, TV sets, refrigerators, beds, resulted from families breaking up instead of doubling the number, do you think that the crime, the disorder, and the damage to children would have been accepted complacently as a case of "change but not deterioration" (the slogan of the 1990s)?

Big business didn't drive the cultural revolution. But the cultural revolution turned out to be very profitable for big business.

And as the breakdown of the family has been good for business, not to speak of armies of government and voluntary social workers of all varieties, then any adverse effects of the breakdown of the family have to be soft-pedalled.

It must be literally among the daftest things that have ever been said, that crime is lower today than it has been since records began. Yet that's what the Home Office officially said in dismissing Cultures and Crimes.

And the Guardian quoted an "expert" (somebody called Professor Mike Hough) who was "bemused" by the book, because "most academics" (still only most academics!) believe that crime rose "in the early 1990s" but that "crime had fallen since then".

The headline in the Guardian was, "Experts deride report on crime and moral decline". Experts? It need not be said that I'm no Einstein (the understatement of the year), but I was reminded of what Einstein said when he heard that Hitler had provided one hundred physicists (wow, that's a lot of experts, Einstein's in trouble now) who all agreed that Einstein was wrong. Einstein remarked, "If I were wrong, one of them would have been enough".

So I agree with the sense of Mr Bramwell's comment. But what interests lie behind any particular long-lasting folly of the intellectuals is sometimes quite a complicated matter, and what those interests are is a puzzle that has to be unravelled in each particular case.

There is an interesting debate about the Civitas book Cultures and Crimes: Policing in Four Nations at the Samizdata website.

A post-graduate student of broadcast journalism has sent me this note. 'I wonder if you could let me know what your feelings are about the way in which reports such as yours are often used in the press to sensationalise.'

My reply to the student is as follows:

The first thing I have to say is that I do not wish to give you the impression that I've had much to do with the media. I haven't. Nearly all of them, nearly all the time, have failed to take a blind bit of notice of what I have written.

I am not complaining. My victim status as a Geordie (strictly a Mackem) of working-class origin and present affiliations is a weak one, and I can therefore only conclude that, when my work has been ignored, it has not been good enough to claim attention.

In an interview last night, the Prime Minister referred to a recently published book. He said that it ignored the national crime statistics that show an overall drop in crime. The only book about crime that was being extensively discussed in the national press and radio at the time was Civitas's, Cultures and Crimes: Policing in Four Nations.

I don't think that, just because I am a faithful member of the Labour party (and have been for far longer than him), Mr Blair will expect that he can misrepresent my purely factual research with impunity, and that I won't answer back.

Beyond statistical matters: though I have a deep sense of inferiority to the Prime Minister in every other respect, I don't feel I'm greatly inferior to him in my direct knowledge of what 'traditional Labour voters' have believed, have valued and what they now experience.

Far from ignoring it, I put the recent overall drop in crime at the heart of of my book.

The total number of crimes rose precipitously from 1955 to 1995. The steep rise was confirmed by the British Crime Survey figures from 1981 to 1995 (blowing the whole of the "moral panic" school out of the water).

From the mid-1990s strenuous efforts were made by ordinary householders and businesses to protect their property. People stayed away from black spots. Car manufacturers installed ingenious security devices. The overall number of crimes fell. That's an essential message of the book.

But where the reduction in the numbers depended upon effective policing, crimes continued to rocket. The national crime figures on robberies that go back beyond 1981 tell their own story.

1954 800
1964 3,000
1974 9,000
1984 24,000
1994 60,000
2003/04 101,000 (of which 91,000 were robberies of personal property, "street crime")

There were 121,000 robberies at the peak of 2001/02, and the number was down to 101,000 by 2003/04. I do not ignore that fact in the book. I highlight it.

Of course the Prime Minister is strictly right. The book does ignore falls in crime that have taken place--since the book was finished. But the implication of his remark is, that when still later figures are published, they will adversely affect the historical and cultural context of the book's findings.To be kind to him, that's not at all likely.

If the Prime Minister was referring to some other book, this posting does not apply.

The first reponse from the Home Office to Cultures and Crimes was that the risk of being a victim of crime is at its lowest since records began.

No! Records began in 1857.

If no notice had been taken of the book, that utterly reckless statement would have done the job nicely.

But notice is being taken of the book, and the Home Office has decided that it will have to be more circumspect. Its latest comments on the book are now the much safer, "Your chance of being a victim of crime is now at its lowest level since 1981".

I don't know if the population figures they use are those of 2001 and 1981 Censuses.

If the Home Office did their calculations on a more refined basis than that of the total population, then they can supply the correction, and show what difference it makes to the percentage (and more importantly, to the argument), directly onto this site.

On the basis of the Census population, the risk of being a victim of a BCS crime was almost precisely the same in 2003/04 as it was in 1981, 22.5 per cent--in fact the 2003/04 figure is fractionally lower than the figure for 1981.

Unfortunately for the Home Office spokespersons, the relevance of their comments in relation to Cultures and Crimes is almost zero. The book starts with the fact that crime in general has fallen from the enormously high levels of its 1995 peak--to the still enormously high levels of 1981 and today. From 1955 there had been a relentless rise in crime, so that by 1981 the first British Crime Survey estimated that there were 11 million crimes in the year. In 2003/04 the BCS estimate was that there were 11.7 million crimes in the year.

Crime fell from the mid-1990s in both the BCS and police-recorded statistics because householders and car manufacturers took more and more elaborate precautions to keep criminals at bay.

The subject of Cultures and Crimes is the category of crimes and disorder where the numbers went on rising until 2001/02: the offences the control of which was least within the power of people themselves, and where dependence on the police was greatest--on the streets.

Sorry! I thought that the Home Office had had the sense to realise that they'd been rumbled. But my wife's just come in with this morning's Daily Express. 'A Home Office spokeswoman said: "Latest figures show the the risk of being a victim is at its lowest level since records began."'

The BCS figures, by the way, do not attempt to touch some of the most rapid areas of crime growth.

In spite of the fact that the reduction in the age of both victims and perpetrators is a phenomenon of many years' standing, the BCS excludes all crimes committed against under-16s.

The BCS excludes all drug crimes.

But, hey! The crime figures look a lot better without them!

On New Year's Eve I posted an essay in which I predicted what the academic reaction to Cultures and Crimes would be.

Right on cue, Professor Mike Hough, the Director of Criminal Policy Research at King's College, London, is quoted in the Observer this morning as saying that "This is nonsense. Academics mostly [sic]agree that crime in the UK rose in the early 1990s".

He only goes so far as to say that academics "mostly" agree that crime was rising in the early 1990s. As I say it was, he can only think that the book is nonsense on that point if he is not among the academics who are now willing to concede that crime was rising, even if only "in the early 1990s". He doesn't tell us.

The book makes clear that from the early 1990s that the criminological and social policy establishment tended to drop the rhetoric of "moral panic" and admit that crime was then rising.

It had dawned on them that the rise in crime could be blamed on the harm that Mrs Thatcher did to 1980s' Britain. But what Professor Hough elides is a core issue: the long period of denial that crime was rising rapidly before (and long before) the 1980s and 1990s.

Is the book nonsense when it says that crime did surge from 1955? Again, Professor Hough is silent.

Professor Hough says that crime peaked around 1995 and has been falling ever since. The book makes quite clear that general crime did fall from the mid-1990s. Professor Hough can't think that bit of the book is nonsense, either, then.

Crimes that were most capable of being controlled by the security measures of householders and manufacturers themselves did peak around 1995 and have been falling ever since. The book gives the statistics that confirm this.

But one of the main points of the book is that crimes the control of which depended largely upon the effectiveness of the police soared away, until the robbery figure of 121,000 in 2001/02 at long last acted as Britain's wake-up call. Professor Hough ignores this crucial fact. It is a fact that is at the very heart of the book's argument.

The spokesperson of the Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo), following no doubt his or her careful study of the book, provides what I called in my essay "contentless" criticism in its purest form. The book, according to the spokesperson, uses conflicting evidence to draw simplistic conclusions. What conflicting evidence? What simplistic conclusions?

The Association of Chief Police Officers, the Observer blandly reports, has reacted "with fury". The Observer, usually alert to such things, makes no comment on the fact that "criticism" of this sort from the most senior police officers in the country is a little unsettling.

The book is "a criticism of the police" only in sense that it argues that the deterioration of the ratio of police officers to crimes, and the diminution of the rights protecting victims as compared with the rights protecting perpetrators, has made it sociologically impossible for the police to engage in effective crime prevention on the old Peelite model.

Police officers are bound to be stuck at their desks for long periods filling out forms, and talk about "beat policing" anything remotely as dense as it was up to the later 1960s, on present "record" police numbers (they are at a record) cannot be anything but moonshine.

As for the Home Office ... "The risk of being a victim is the lowest since records began." Well, who could have possibly worked that one out from the Home Office's figures?

Ron Bramwell speaks of his gut feeling as a police officer that crime surged after 1955 because there were more things to steal.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, England was still reaping the benefits of having a head start on all other countries in the industrial revolution, and there were many more things to steal at the end the century than there had been in the middle. Criminal Statistics 1908 summed up the period in these words:

"Crime has increased very little in the past half century, and taking into account the greater opportunities open nowadays to an indiviudal of criminal tendencies through the greater profusion of wealth and personal possessions ... it may reasonably be inferred that the members of the predatory classes are appreciably fewer than in 1857 in spite of the fact that in the interim the population has almost doubled."

The pervasive tone of the literature of Edwardian times is a settled confidence that England was indeed steadily becoming a still more crime-free and civilised society. What George Dangerfield called "The Strange Death of Liberal England" did not occur until later, when George V was on the throne.

Cultures and Crimes, Civitas's new book on crime and the police, will be published early next week. Cultures and Crimes looks at crime and policing within the context of the cultures of four societies, England, France, Germany and the United States.

I am one of the authors, and in the case of this volume I have the unusual advantage of being able to answer the principal criticism before it is made. It will be that "everybody knows", and everybody has known "for the past thirty or forty years", that the figures of police recorded crime are no good, and that nothing can be said about crime on the basis of them.