Britain is not addicted to punishing criminals

Mr Timpson, the new prisons minister, is the head of a company that employs about 600 ex-prisoners, and this is an admirable and humane social service. But good as this experience is, it is insufficient to decide on public policy as a whole. 

In a recent interview, Mr Timpson said that there were far too many people in prison in Britain, that at least a third of prisoners should not be in prison, and that Britain had a Victorian obsession with punishment. It would probably be more true to say that Britain has an obsession with absence or mildness of punishment. 

There is no correct number of prisoners per capita that is independent of the number of crimes committed. If there had never been any crimes committed but there were a low number of prisoners, this would be an outrage against justice. I need hardly point out that this is not the situation in which we are living. 

In 1938, there were 11,086 prisoners in the United Kingdom. Today there are nearly ten times as many, which means that, taking growth of population into account, there are approximately six times as many prisoners in prison as there were in 1938.

But there are six times as many indictable crimes per prisoner today as there were in 1938, suggesting that there has been a vast increase, probably hundreds or even thousands of per cent, in criminality. In 1950, by which time criminality was increasing fast, the barrister and magistrate, Sir Leo Page, was already complaining of the leniency of sentencing for serious crimes. 

Consider for a moment the average prisoner in this country. If Mr Timpson were correct, you would expect that the criminal justice system had an off-with-their-head approach to punishment. But in fact, most prisoners have been convicted five or ten times before they ever reach prison. And the detection rate of crimes, including serious ones such as burglary, is not more than 10 per cent, and often much less. 

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Could these be the online comments of young Kemi Badenoch?

On the assumption that those in prison are average for criminals, and that criminality is concentrated even today in a relatively small proportion of the population, the average prisoner may have committed between ten and 100 offences before he ever gets into prison. For many years, I used to ask prisoners in the prison in which I worked as a doctor what they had actually done, by comparison with what they had been charged with having done. They knew that I would pass this information on to no one. Practically all of them admitted to having committed five or ten times as much crime as they had ever been charged with. A professional arsonist (for ‘insurance jobs’) told me that he had burnt down 20 premises before he was caught; a car thief had stolen hundreds of cars. 

One survey stated that it is easier to find in a prison someone convicted 40 times (who had possibly therefore committed at least 200 crimes) than it is to find someone who was imprisoned for a first conviction. And the latter was probably convicted of a very serious crime such as murder. 

It must be remembered that most criminals have already been through the mill of non-custodial sentences by the time they reach prison – fines, probation, community service, and so forth. The corruption of the idea of probation has been complete: and the notion that an occasional visit to a probation officer can prevent a multi-recidivist from reoffending is inherently absurd. 

Fortunately, criminality declines with age irrespective of what is done. Except for sex offences, activities such as burglary and robbery decline with age constantly. By the time someone is in their late thirties, they almost always stop committing these crimes – or at any rate are less frequently detected, which is an unlikely explanation. 

Absurd sentencing of vicious and dangerous criminal exerts a relentlessly downward pressure on sentencing for lesser crimes. I will quote one emblematic case, that of Tony Virasami. He was a violent career criminal, on bail.

One day he was called by his girlfriend, also a criminal, because she had got into some kind of argument in a supermarket. Virasami came to the supermarket, viciously punched the man with whom he thought his girlfriend had argued, which killed the man when he hit his head on the floor. When Virasami realised he had punched the wrong person, went looking for the ‘right man’ – as the judge put it in his sentencing remarks. He was given four years and would be out in two. The judge was following the sentencing guidelines. 

What sentence, then, can be given to someone who only burgles your house, if some sense of proportion is to be kept in punishment? Does all of this sound like a ‘Victorian obsession with punishment’? 

No one wants a society in which people behave reasonably because there is a policeman round every corner and prison beckons if we step out of line. We do not live in such a society. Millions of people refrain from burgling their neighbours’ houses every day, and not because they would be punished if they did so. They refrain from stealing even if they could get away with it. But human beings vary, and populations can shift either in the direction of criminality or law-abidingness. 

Punishment is not therapy for the soul, though it would be good if it acted in this way. The criminal justice system should always remember that it is not the medical profession for those who break the law.