Many Italians find the relationship between their Prime Minister and Colonel Gaddafi embarrassing, with one think tank saying ‘Italy has become the Disneyland of Gaddafi and his senile vanities.’ However, despite the hilarity these two leaders provide for the media, the lucrative business deals (Libya is rich in oil) that follow in the Colonel’s wake seem to make his presence more tolerable. An even larger incentive for putting up with Gaddafi’s odd behaviour is the need to have Libya on side to tackle immigration – namely the crossing of migrants in boats from Libya to Italy – but just how much is Italy willing to pay to secure Libya’s cooperation?

Libya is Africa’s gateway to Europe. Every year, thousands of Africans risk their lives and savings to attempt the perilous crossing to the Italian island of Lampedusa. The tiny island is one of the closest European territories to Libya and it represents a chance at Italian citizenship, which if granted, thanks to the EU’s Schengen Agreement, would allow migrants to move freely within the EU. The boats attempting to reach Lampedusa are often overcrowded and badly equipped, the journeys are long, and in many cases the migrants are from Western and sub-Sahara African countries and have already endured harrowing journeys just to reach the Libyan coastline.

Immigration is an explosive subject in Italy. Only a couple of years ago Italy was struggling to cope with a huge influx of migrants and asylum seekers, usually coming on boats from Libya. However, in 2008 Italy signed the ‘Treaty on Friendship, Partnership and Cooperation’ with Libya,  with the result that the ‘boat people’ found in international waters would be returned to Libya to have their cases ‘processed’ by humanitarian organisations.

Has this ‘push-back’ agreement been a success? It has undoubtedly kept migrants away from Italy – the number of migrants reaching Italian shores has dropped considerably since the treaty came into practice in April 2009 (by about 90%). There is also a planned border satellite project designed to tackle immigration across the Libyan border. For many the deal was worth the flip side – a guarantee of $5 billion for infrastructure projects in Libya over the next 20 years – at this price Berlusconi (and many other EU states) are happy to overlook serious  concerns over the plight of migrants returned to Libya, (just this week, Amnesty International implored the Italian Prime Minister to  challenge Gaddafi on his country’s appalling human rights record).

Now Gaddafi hopes to ‘deepen bilateral arrangements’, claiming Tripoli needs €5 billion per year to halt migration flows ‘or Europe will become Africa’. His threat to re-open the ‘floodgates’ of migration, unless the EU pays through the nose to secure Libya’s borders, demonstrates the EU may need to explore other ways of  managing the migration of the African boat people. Behind the facade of friendship, beautiful models and purebred horses, it seems Gaddafi is a volatile partner, happy to hold the EU hostage for his own ends.

Research commissioned by the corporation behind a magical kingdom not so far away suggests that one in five parents have ‘forgotten’ how to play with their children.  This poses the question: ‘why bother?’ when both parent and child can have their Mickey Mouse pasta shapes served by a preened and polished Barbie doll, fireworks on cue to explode half past the hour, every hour, and round the clock entertainment at Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show.

I’ve regularly consoled myself with the thought that, though I find playtime in excess of 20 minutes with other people’s children unbearably monotonous, with my own I’ll have an invested maternal interest in their creative and imaginative development.   Clearly I am laboring under a misapprehension.  One third of the 2,000 parents interviewed for the report conducted by Tanya Byron, clinical child psychologist by day and Minnie Mouse by night, tardily raised their hands and confessed to finding game-playing with their families ‘boring.’  These parents should not be punished for their misgivings, and are perhaps part of a majority made up with dishonest parents amongst the sample.   Of the 2,000 interviewees aged between five and fifteen years, one-tenth have their wits about them and can detect the waning enthusiasm in mummy and daddy’s voices when offering Pooh Bear another slice of cake.  With sibling rivalry pitched as the biggest problem for nearly a third of disenchanted families gathering around the Monopoly board, passing the dice to your offspring and making a swift exit isn’t a quick fix solution.  Negotiating disputes between the proprietors of Trafalgar Square and Bond Street is no less tiring than participating.

Byron urges parents to consider the four key components of ‘successful playtime’ – ‘education, inspiration, integration and communication.’  Parents should ‘take a step back and think back to how their own childhood games used these four pillars and how they can implement them now.’  However, for parents involved in the remembrance of things past, rendering a penchant for make-believe is no simple task.

Have parents ‘forgotten’ how to play with their children? Or, is the state of play a state of mind—an indulgence in nostalgia necessarily bereft of children.  Mary Bowers eloquently articulates a rise of Peter Pan syndrome in today’s timesonline.com.  Museums and zoos are child’s play, but increasingly venues are holding exclusive evenings, for adults only. ‘After dark, when children close their eyes, their toys come alive—or so the grown-ups would have them believe,’ writes Bowers.

Rather than advising the personal pursuit play, for once we need another child-centred approach.  Play needn’t have a Kleinian ulterior motive, for parent or child. Parents need to be encouraged to enjoy watching and engaging as a pursuit in itself, and should relish the times when they lose themselves, if only momentarily, with their children, Pooh Bear, and a miniature tea set.

Misguided assumptions

Ken Clarke, Secretary of State for Justice, and Andrew Bridges, Chief Inspector of Probation, have argued for fewer and shorter sentences on cost grounds. Sir David Latham, England and Wales’ parole chief, claimed that ’society needs to realise that we can’t create a world which is free of risk’ while making the case for releasing more offenders on licence. Crispin Blunt, Justice Minister, suggested that locking more criminals up represents ‘a failure to deal with crime and a failure to tackle re-offending’. However, such arguments fail to account for several key factors:

• Existing community sentences, compared with prison sentences, have no apparent impact on re-offending rates. (p. 7)
• Offenders are prevented from committing crimes against the general public while in prison. (p. 4)
• The number of crimes committed by offenders is much larger than the number for which they are eventually convicted; for example one estimate suggested as many as 136 burglaries per conviction for burglary. (p. 9)
• The substantial economic costs associated with each offence that have to be borne by individuals, businesses and public services. For example, a single theft (on average) is estimated to cost £1,000, a serious wounding £21,000. (p. 9)

Ken Pease, author of the report, uses Home Office estimates to show that 13,892 offences resulting in convictions could be prevented by keeping offenders on short sentences in prison for one extra month. However, this is only a small proportion of the overall offences prevented given the number of offences undetected or detected but not officially processed. (p. 10)

Pease estimates that if every successful conviction represented a conservative 5.9 offences committed by the offender, then the costs of imprisonment would be the same as the costs of crime prevented. This means that for Britain’s more prolific offenders (many of whom are currently given only short sentences), it would be less costly to keep them in prison for longer periods than to give them alternative sentences in the community where they have the capacity to re-offend.

This heavily undermines assumptions that our current rate of imprisonment is a net cost to society. A significant Italian study (p. 6) suggests that periodic pardons of prisoners there cost a great deal in additional crime committed. A recent pardon is estimated to have cost some two billion euros in additional crime. Failure to use prison sentences when appropriate could lead to increases in crime which are costly both in financial terms and in denying respite from crime to the most hard-pressed communities.

Misconceptions about prison

• Ken Clarke and others have implied that Britain has a punitive prison policy on a par with the Victorian era. However, as Pease notes: ‘When one calculates the prison population in relation to the number of crimes recorded, the illusion of harsh sentencing disappears.’ (p.3)
• Andrew Bridges claims that each prisoner costs ‘at least £40,000′ a year. But, as the report shows, this is a grossly inflated estimate according to Government figures: ‘…the most recent Prisons Annual Report calculates annual cost per prisoner at £27,343.’ (p. 4)

Incapacitation impact of prison ignored by official statistics

The report notes that official statistics ignore the impact of incapacitation on re-offending. Re-offending rates between community and custodial sentences are compared from the start of community sentences but from the end of custodial sentences. This means that the primary benefit of prison, the prevention of crime during an offender’s sentence, is excluded from government comparisons of the costs and benefits of different sentencing regimes, biasing analyses in favour of supposedly ‘less expensive’ non-custodial sentences. Ken Pease explains:

‘Someone convicted four times in the year after getting a community penalty is regarded as an equal success or failure as someone convicted four times in the year after being released from one year in prison, despite the fact that in the one year in prison, no convictions occurred. The one year of respite that prison gave the community is, and always has been, simply spirited out of reconviction statistics, leaving the impression that imprisonment and community sentences are equivalent purveyors of public protection.’ (more explanation on p.3 of the report)

This means that prison sentences are not given a fair hearing during policy considerations. Their likely substantial impact on crime reduction is at best overlooked and, at worst, ignored.

Community sentences versus prison

1. Impact of community sentences on re-offending

Home Office statistics show that the type of sentence has very little effect on the likelihood of individuals re-offending.

‘The reconviction figures for both community sentences and custody are almost exactly as would be predicted beforehand. In short, community sentences as currently delivered have no evident effect on rates of reconviction.’ (p. 7)

This indicates that, in all likelihood, ‘community sentences afford no measurable level of public protection’ (p. 7) and that, until better community sentence regimes are developed, prison remains an indispensable option in reducing re-offending rates through incapacitation and deterrence.

2. Impact of prison sentences on re-offending

The report suggests a more realistic way to model the incapacitation effect of imprisonment on crime. It acknowledges that the re-conviction rate is only a small proportion of crime committed by offenders and that significantly more crime can be prevented through incapacitating likely repeat offenders. It also applies the Home Office’s study of the economic and social costs of crime to estimate savings made through successful crime prevention.

Pease examines the highest re-offending group on release: offenders given sentences of less than 12 months in prison. They have an average re-conviction rate of over three crimes per annum (p. 8). He calculates that keeping this group in prison for one extra month would cost around £90 million (p.10). However, on relatively conservative assumptions, that additional cost of imprisonment will be recouped through the cost of crime prevented that otherwise blights local communities. If this high re-offending group commits 5.9 offences for every offence they are convicted for, then the economic costs have already broken even with the costs of crime prevented. In addition, communities have been spared a higher crime rate.

The true figure of re-offending is likely to be far higher, making prison a bargain rather than a burden. (p. 10)

***

i. Professor Ken Pease, of the Manchester Business School, is an internationally acclaimed criminologist. He has acted as a consultant to a number of international organisations including the United Nations, the Council of Europe and the Customs Co-operation Council. He is also a former Parole Board member.

ii. Prison, Community Sentencing and Crime can be read here.

YouGov’s poll for Deloitte found that a mere 89 respondents from a group of 4,199 were considering buying a 3D TV in the coming year. This time period is in itself a false measure of demand, implying that TVs are no longer durable goods to be bought and utilised until failure as the majority of consumers still believe. Instead, the new premise is that TVs are luxury goods and a form of conspicuous consumption – flatscreen to HD to 3D – a linear family tree of TVs that the consumer must climb.

This premise has so far failed to take hold,  as evidenced in the 2% ‘positive’ response to the survey. Crucially it forgets an  essential adage of marketing, that the consumer is king (or queen). While it is convenient for electronic companies to hope the consumer treats their products as many do clothes (buying the latest and greatest), conspicuous consumption does not guide our TV purchasing habits.

Paul Lee, Deloitte’s media director complained that, ‘it is remarkable how conservative people’s predictions for their own technology spending habits over the coming year were. They didn’t have to commit to buying anything during the research and yet still predicted very little spend on TV products moving forward’.

This statement is a curious one, implying that the respondents should have said ‘yes’ to 3D TVs because they might as well – no one would later force them to honour their decision and the TV companies can smile at the positive response to their products. Everyone is happy.  Paul Lee assumes that the consumer should want a 3D TV but this demand is not-existent for the most part.

Perhaps there is also a huge ‘elephant-in-the-room’ situation here, that is, that Britain is still in a recession and few have the purchasing power, let alone the inclination, to buy these products while their older TVs work perfectly well.

It has barely been nine months since the film Avatar demonstrated the potential of 3D and only a few years since HD TV debuted. Technological innovation may be an increasingly rapid process, but this is something the consumer often cannot or does not want to keep up with and buying into these value-added benefits occurs over the long-term, often skipping out intermediate stages. Indeed, it may foster an attitude of expectance, that it is better to hold off purchasing a new TV until the price of the current technology reduces or a newer model/product is supplied. While 4D TV is rather unlikely, there are still clear improvements required in the 3D market.

The need for ‘those glasses’, still required for the 3D experience, is a technology which hasn’t really moved on since they came free with comics in the early 1990s. Wearing a pair of 3D glasses over normal glasses will not appeal to many, and won’t promote a surge in demand for contact lenses either. Indeed most people may see the effort needed to use  the 3D TVs as a false benefit and would prefer to wait until such time as 3D requires no accessories, or they would rather forego it all together.

Britain is far from a nation of Luddites but the market researchers are expecting an unlikely paradigm shift from our categorising of TVs as durable goods.  The value of 3D TV in its current state is hard for consumers to see, but they won’t be putting on their 3D specs to correct this any time soon.

In July, French President, Nicholas Sarkozy, pledged to dismantle at least 300 Roma camps and to ‘repatriate’  700 individuals of Roma ethnicity because, he said, they were  ‘sources of illegal trafficking, profoundly shocking living standards, exploitation of children for begging, prostitution and crime’.

The initial Roma evictions will be voluntary – with adults being given €300 (and an additional €100 for each child) to return to their original member state (in most cases Romania). However, Romania has said that, unless its citizens have committed a crime, they are EU nationals and cannot be prevented from leaving Romania again.

Sarkozy’s resolution has garnered mixed responses. Some have said it raises questions on the future of the free movement of EU citizens, whilst others go further, and argue it could potentially set a racist precedence that allows the targeting of specific minority groups. For example, France’s League of Human Rights worries that Sarkozy is using the Roma as scapegoats to improve  his popularity in turbulent political times.

However, the Italian interior minister, Roberto Maroni, spoke out in support of Sarkozy’s decision; his only criticism was that the move does not go far enough. In the Italian newspaper, Corriere della Sera, Mr Maroni suggested EU member states should be allowed to expel other member state nationals  ‘who violate rules on requirements for living in another member state: a minimum level of income, adequate housing and not being a burden on the social welfare system of the country hosting them’ . The minister, from the Northern League Party, has asked for immigration to play a key role in the September EU Summit.

So far, the EU has remained eerily quiet on this issue. Uncertainty rages as to whether the expulsion of citizens should be a matter for national governments to decide or if it should be tackled at the EU level. Its reluctance to take a clear stance appears to give member states the right to decide which EU nationals can remain within their borders… And yet the EU does seem uncomfortable with France’s decision. The Belgium Government, which currently holds the rotating 6-month EU Presidency, is considering rejecting France’s request for a ministerial meeting if it is to be dominated by the  ‘Roma question’ .

France’s policy also calls into question the future of the Schengen Agreement. The idea of expelling EU nationals goes against the EU’s ideals of creating an  ‘ever closer union’, including the freedom of movement of peoples. The newest EU members, Bulgaria and Romania, may be negotiating their entry to the Schengen zone, but this is not a promising start.

Immigration is a political hot potato, even more so in times of economic crisis; a delay in the EU’s response can only encourage a blurring of legal lines. A short while ago Italy proposed a similar move to France’s Roma expulsion, but it was quickly quashed by the EU – instead the Italian Government was allowed to fingerprint the Roma population. Two years, and one painful economic recession later, the EU has simply cautioned France to act within the realms of ‘international law’.

Many member states’ struggle to cope with immigration has been worsened by the economic crisis. To avoid minorities being singled out as scapegoats, the EU should clarify that its values apply to all EU citizens, and thereby encourage national governments to adopt fair policies on immigration.

It is an article of faith amongst some prison reformers that the use of short prison sentences increases the chance of re-offending, sometimes turning a one-time offender towards a life of crime. They are counter-productive in terms of fighting crime, they argue. According to the most recent systematic evidence, this is probably not the case.

Martin Killias and Patrice Villetaz performed a systematic review of empirical studies into the comparative effects of short custodial sentences with non-custodial alternatives for the Campbell Collaboration Crime and Justice Group. It was published in 2008. They found: ‘custodial and non-custodial sanctioned do not differ very much much in their effects on re-offending… claims about damaging effects of short-term confinement may have been overstated’. They suggest that this gives policy makers more options. If it turns out to be cheaper to use a community sentence, then it can do just as much to tackle re-offending as custody. On the other hand, if a custodial sentence fits the seriousness of the crime, it is unlikely that a brief period of incarceration will put the offender at greater risk of recidivism.

In the UK, offenders on short sentences are amongst those most likely to re-offend. There are two ways of thinking about this. One is that custody clearly didn’t work and these offenders should not have been sentenced to prison at all. Another is that custody was working (in that it was stopping re-offending during the sentence) and, in fact, it might have been appropriate to keep the offender in prison for longer. What this systematic review suggests is that alternatives to custody are not (yet) predictably superior at tackling long-term re-offending. This means that when it is worthwhile to incarcerate an individual (both as a fitting punishment and to incapacitate them temporarily), there isn’t much of a trade-off in terms of increased re-offending later down the line.

Short custodial sentences have very limited powers to rehabilitate. But the alternatives are not much better for the moment.