PROTECTING us from violent assault, rape and murder is the Government’s highest priority. Or so ministers keep telling us.
So it is reasonable to assume that the police, probation and prison services — all at the frontline of crime fighting — are working closely together to keep us safe; that sharing detailed intelligence and information about the dangerous men in their charge is the very bedrock of their jobs. Wrong.
A disturbing new report by the big three criminal justice watchdogs reveals that the services simply don’t talk to each other. This means, incredibly, that four out of ten prisoners are released without anyone bothering to find out whether they pose a risk to the public.
It means that some of the most violent people in the country are let back on to our streets without the prison service even telling the police. It means that police might find out that a violent criminal is on the loose again only when they attend a bloody crime with his fingerprints all over the scene.
It means that horrifying cases such as the murders of Naomi Bryant and John Monckton — both killed by violent men released from prison — are too likely to happen again.
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But read further into the report and it gets worse. The Government’s mantra of “putting the victim first” begins to sound like a crude joke.
Any half-competent psychologist will tell you that most criminals don’t think of their victims as real people. If they could be taught to, crime would drop dramatically. For years “victim awareness” sessions have been widely acknowledged to be a potent method of reducing repeat offences. Yet most prisons still fail to offer inmates any information about the awful impact that crime has on their victims.
I have lost count of the number of times in the past decade the authorities have acknowledged that close liaison between the prison, probation and police services is vital for public protection.
If keeping us safe really is the Government’s greatest priority then it needs to do two things, and fast — force the three crime-fighting services to work together, and fire any manager who fails to do so. And it needs to insist that no violent prisoner is released without the police being given the opportunity to meet him at the prison gates.
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Katharine Raymond is a former special adviser to the Government