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MAJOR ISSUES BULLETIN |
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Are you SAFER in your Home
-in the Street -? with so many criminals
denied jail by politically correct * It’s no good just blaming
the JUDGES. * Daily Mail
Tuesday, June 13-2006. COMMENTARY By David Green ON THE surface, it is a
cause for celebration. The
Attorney-General, Lord Goldsmith, as attacked a large number of senior
judges for being too soft on sex offenders and other criminals who have
committed grave offences, including rape and murder. He is particularly angered by the leniency often shown to
paedophiles. Only yesterday the problem was illustrated in the case of Craig Sweeney, 24, a convicted paedophile who abducted and sexually abused a tree-year-old and was told at Cardiff Crown Court, that he would have to serve a minimum of just five years and 108 days of his life sentence. Such leniency is a disgrace
and coincides with the release by Lord Goldsmith of a report, which criticises
more than 200 judges and quotes 339 specific cases in which he challenged
judge’s sentences in the Court of Appeal for being too soft. In more than
three-quarters of these cases, he gained tougher sentences. [BUT will they ALL ever be
completed in full? - with the new Lord Chief Justice so fervent about reducing
sentences-rather than press the Government to build more prisons which is the
only REAL answer to ensure that those convicted of crime get the sentence they
deserve and which the victims or their families expect -not the sentence guidelines
the Lord Chief Justice lays down in order to keep the prison population from
exploding because of a Government insistent in refusing to build more prisons for
which £30,000,000 was earmarked two years ago and which are required because of
its own actions or inactions of that Government over the past nine years.] To return: So yes, there is ample evidence that many judges have been too lenient in any number of cases- and it is an issue that needs redress. Yet in lecturing, naming and
shaming judges over their lenient sentences, Lord Goldsmith and HIS GOVERNMENT
are culpable of the most monstrous, buck-passing hypocrisy. For this
GOVERNMENT, with its liberal approach to criminal justice has created the very
atmosphere in which judges are, in most cases, obliged to pass lenient
sentences. For Lord Goldsmith to
pretend that the main problem with our judicial system is that ultra-liberal
judges systematically flout the will of the Government, Parliament and the
People is too simplistic. The truth is that some judges-and a surprising proportion of magistrates-are actually angered by the fact that the system often makes it impossible for them to deal as severely with child molesters, rapists, sex traffickers and killers as they would wish. Increasingly they are
‘guided’- and woe betide them if they ignore this guidance-by the Government’s
Sentencing Guidelines Council, chaired by the GOVERNMENT’S Lord Chief
Justice, Lord Phillips. This body tells them what sentences they must
impose, and what circumstances they may not take into account when passing
judgment. [Over the past decade the words of a great and leaned Lord Chief Justice of England Sir Edward Coke (1552-1634): ‘For a man’s Home is his
Castle’ and ‘Magna
Carta is such a fellow, that he will have no Sovereign.’ (On
the Lords’ Amendment to the Petition of Right -17th May 1628) - have been undermined by the actions of the present Lord Chief Justice who should have the welfare of the common man in full view and not the convenience of an untruthful and despotic manipulating Government.] To Return: A centralising GOVERNMENT, fixated on guidelines and procedures, is steadily undermining the freedom of the judiciary. And, surprise, surprise, the real effect of judicial guidelines is to make it more-not less difficult to sentence offenders to imprisonment. The guidelines also ensure that those jail sentences, which are imposed. are often shorter than judges themselves would wish. Why would the GOVERNMENT and
its Sentencing Guidelines Council want to discourage stiff prison sentences?
Because our jails are disgracefully overcrowded, and civil servants genuinely
fear what might happen if the prison population rises a few thousand from its
present level of 80,000-plus. [Well the answer in there for the asking -all the GOVERNMENT needs to do is to get hold of hundreds of Polish carpenters and of other trades and get them to put up temporary accommodation -post haste!] To return: The solution to this problem is not to impose unacceptably short sentences, or to leave criminals on the street who should be locked away. It is surely to build more prisons. YET -Treasury mandarins
remain resolutely set against such an option. It would admittedly, be costly,
and the Treasury is not contrary to popular opinion-in the business of
encouraging what it regards as profligacy by Whitehall Departments. [BUT they allowed Tony
Blair to give up OUR hard fought for EU REBATE of £7,000,000,000+-without a whimper.] As for the Home office, it
has long been a nest of the ‘progressive’ liberal left and top officials regard
prison as crude, cruel and ineffective. [No doubt Holidays in the Sun is more in their line
particularly if they themselves can accompany the so labelled misunderstood
criminals on their so-called ordeal.] Not, they feel, the sort of punishment civilised people, interested in ‘rehabilitating’ criminals, rather than punishing wrong-doers, or protecting society from their depredations, should be imposing on others. SADLY however, there is little evidence that rehabilitation programmes are effective. Even so, the Home Office seems happiest when criminals receive non-custodial sentences, or brief terms of imprisonment, and are, in any case, released early. Many Ministers agree with this ‘progressive’ cant. But it is not only the Home
Office. Since 1997, the Labour Government has ensured that senior judicial
appointments have gone to bien-pensant, progressives who instinctively
dislike prison. The result, again, is that custodial sentences are sneered at. Lord Goldsmith can berate the judges for their leniency -but this misbegotten state of affairs is the direct result of his OWN GOVERNMENT’S
POLICIES
-and as is so often in New Labour, these policies are a mass of contradictions. [This
is no accident as the same so-called procedure to avoid getting to the root of
the problem has been developing in the Totalitarian European Union over the
past five decades. Whatever the problem
they go round it and look for another distraction in another area to create a
smokescreen so that the previous problem is obscured from view. Always blame
someone or something else is their motivation and DON’T let the TRUTH emerge
whatever you do.] The result is a Criminal Justice
System that fails to serve its people as it should-that upsets and undermines
the POLICE-and that hampers [INDEPENDENT] Judges and Magistrates from doing
THEIR JOB. * * * Prison really DOES work by Dr David Green Daily MailTuesday, June 20-2006. It saves the nation money,
reduces crime and is better at reforming offenders. A sense of deep crisis hangs
over the prison system. While public concern mounts over short sentences for
serious offenders, parts of our political elite and judiciary express anxiety
about the size of the supposedly excessive use of custody. The Chief Inspector of prisons Anne Owers, claims that our jails are now full to capacity, barely able to cope with current demands. The Lord Chief Justice, Lord Phillips, warns that too many criminals are being sent to prison in the first place. And a phalanx of lobby
groups, such as the Prison Reform Trust, argues that the jail system only
encourages crime by dehumanising its inmates.
It is, to use one of the campaigners favourite slogans ‘an expensive way of making
bad people worse’. But as the problem of
overcrowding becomes more intense, neither the Government nor the judicial establishment
seems willing to contemplate the obvious solution: BUILD MORE PRISONS This is partly because of the perceived costs, partly because of the Left-wing ideology, which holds that PRISONS in themselves are a bad idea. According to such thinking, a large prison population should be regarded as a badge of shame in a civilised society. Wasted But such an outlook is utterly misguided. For the truth is that prisons are not only the most effective method of protecting the public from criminal behaviour, they are also, in the long-term cheaper than the alternatives. The entire cost of running our prisons is just £2.2 Billion -barely a fraction of the cost of the Welfare State. To put it in perspective,
that is smaller than the sum wasted every year on benefit fraud And given that the COST of CRIME across the country is estimated at -£60 Billion [£60,000,000,000] -a year, a prison system for
£2.2 billion is surely a bargain. It is absurd to argue that
21st century Britain, one of the most affluent countries in the
world, with public expenditure over £520 billion a year, cannot afford to build
any more prisons and therefore has to treat convicted criminals more leniently. Anti-prison campaigners are
of course, fond of claiming that jail does not work [Well they would be out of a
job],
pointing to the high levels of re-offending among ex-convicts. But this is to ignore the
crucial point that when a criminal is locked up, it is physically impossible
for him to commit any offences. He may return to his life of
crime once he is released, BUT at least when he is inside, the PUBLIC IS SAFE FROM HIM There are sobering
statistics to show just how many crimes he might committed had he NOT
been locked up. According to a Home Office
survey in 2000, the average inmate committed: 140 crimes in the 12 months before his admission into custody. On
that basis, if we locked up 10,000 more
offenders a year, we could prevent 1.4 million offences, -saving
the PUBLIC PURSE a fortune as well as reducing aggravation for law-abiding
citizens. The indisputable fact is that, according to POLICE RECORDS -and the authoritative
British Crime Survey, crime levels have fallen when more offenders have been
sent to PRISON. YET the conjunction of a
rising jail population and declining crime causes the anti-prison brigade to
descend into tortuously illogical thinking and intellectual absurdities as they
refuse to FACE UP TO THE FACTS. So John Denham, the normally
well-balanced Labour MP who chairs the HOME AFFAIRS SELECT COMMITTEE absurdly stated at the weekend that
he could not see why we were jailing so many people at a time of falling CRIME. Is he really so blinded by
DOGMA that he CANNOT SEE that CRIME is on the way down precisely because MORE
CRIMINALS are being kept OFF THE STREETS? THE LESSON OF RECENT HISTORY
IS THAT PRISON WORKS. We should be celebrating that reality by building more jails, not wringing our hands about overcrowding. It was the Tory politician Michael Howard who first challenged the progressive consensus. Until he became Home Secretary in 1993, the conventional wisdom was that RISING CRIME was inevitable and that the duty of the Government was to keep as many offenders as possible out of jail. Mrs Thatcher was known as
the Iron Lady, but there was nothing tough about her administration’ s penal
policy. Successive Home Secretaries such as Douglas Hurd [The one who having signed the Maastricht Treaty in 1992 -was heard to say’We had
better read it to find out what it said’,
or something along these lines] - and Kenneth Clarke swallowed the anti-prison line which predominated at the Home Office, allowing the widespread use of parole, cautions, executive early release and community sentences and massively extendingCRIMINAL’S RIGHTS-through measures such as
the Police and Criminal Evidence
Act. AS A RESULT, THE CRIME RATE
SOARED. Bursting Michael Howard showed far more courage than his predecessors. He wanted to tackle CRIME, not manage its rise, and he saw PRISON as a crucial weapon. For the first time since the Fifties, a Home Secretary presided OVER A DROP IN CRME. Under LABOUR, the prison
population continued to rise. This explains why surveys show crime figures have
been falling gently. Labour
is far too complacent. Those convicted of offences continue to be treated too
leniently; one recent study found that of defendants who had already been
convicted of ten or more indictable-that is serious offences at Crown Court, ONLY 37% were given custodial sentences [In other words 63 criminals who should have gone to jail were back on the streets.] The other two-thirds walked away with some sort of community punishment, which is NO REAL DETERRENT to SERIAL CRIMINALS. ALL RESEARCH shows that
reconviction rates for those serving community sentences are just as high as
for those coming out of prison. The crucial difference is
that those supposedly under supervision in the community are STILL FREE TO
COMMIT CRIMES as proven by a litany of resent crimes committed by people under
the care of the PROBATION SERVICE [?] Also, it is a myth that
Britain sends more people to prison than any other European country. The claim is based entirely on a straightforward population head count. But a revealing indicator is a comparison of CRIME RATES. Lenient On that basis, we still have one of the most lenient regimes. Britain has only 12 people in
prison for every 1,000 recorded crimes, compared with 33 in Ireland and
48 in Spain. Tellingly, both countries
have far lower rates of recorded crime than we do. But, say critics, prisons harden criminals rather than rehabilitate them. NONSENSE! Properly managed prisons are much more efficient at rehabilitating criminals than the community. Especially as community rehabilitation schemes are often based on nothing more than a one-hour weekly meeting with a probation officer. Rehabilitation can take
place only over a long period in prison, where the inmate can receive intensive
supervision, mentoring and counselling.
Particularly beneficial is the way that a well-functioning humane prison
regime can guide drug users away from their habits. Moreover, prison can also ensure an inmate receives-perhaps for the first time in his life-a decent education. Most offenders come from dysfunctional backgrounds- no fewer than 27 per cent have been in local authority care and 35 per cent have other family members who have been in prison- but the only way to break the cycle of offending is by taking them AWAY from that self-destructive environment and providing a REAL ALTERNATIVE. PRISON CAN DO THAT. THE COMMUNITY CANNOT. Ultimately, an efficient
prison system is both HUMANE and REWARDING. BUT our present overcrowded,
under funded, derided, chaotic system is not able to function successfully. A PROPER JAIL-BUILDING
PROGRAMMEE IS THE ONLY WAY David Green is Director of think-tank
CIVITAS * * * [Font altered-Bolding &
Underlining used-comments in brackets] * THE SCALES OF JUSTICE ARE
LOWERED BY NEW LABOURIN THE FAVOUR OF THE
CRIMINAL THEY LIED TO YOU THAT THEY
ARE STRONG ON ‘LAW AND ORDER’ LOOK AROUND YOUR-LANE- ROAD-
STREET-IS IT SAFER SINCE 1997? HOW MANY BOBBIE’S ON THE BEAT HAVE
YOU SEEN RECENTLY (EXCEPT LONDON?] * * * David Green is Director of
the Think-Tank CIVITAS. * * * [Font altered-bolding & underlining used-comments in brackets] JUNE/06 * LATEST! Andrew Alexander* Daily Mail Friday, July 7-2006 Prison works… It’s
letting people out
that doesn’t ONCE upon a time, when I was much younger, I used to think how grim it must be to live in a country, a dictatorship for example, where the forces of law and order were regarded with hatred, ridicule and contempt. Now alas, I know. We have become a nation where the police outrage ordinary citizens through daily stories of blundering, inactivity and their inability to distinguish between criminals and victims. At times they seem determined to bring stupidity into disrepute. As for the judges- drawn from a curiously unworldly class once miscalled Hampstead liberals - the public must constantly also wonder whose side they are on. The lightness of their sentencing stems not just from a shortage of prison places, but a belief that imprisonment does not work. They can prove it, you see.
Criminals emerge from prison and commit more crimes. The punishment does not
work. The fools! To use the Latin
which lawyers enjoy, they accept post hoc ergo propter hoc- what
happens after an event is caused by it. To the ordinary law-abiding
citizens, cause and effect are clearer. Of course prison does not work if the
sentences are too short or conditions too easy. Softness incentivises the
criminal. He reckons that conviction is unlikely anyway given the low detection
rate and that a subsequent soft sentence makes crime worth the risk. * I ONCE asked a judge why the
COURTS -did not make use of heavy
fines. ‘ ‘But they would not pay them’-came
the feeble reply. IN FACT -COURTS can either
imprison non-payers or, significantly send in the bailiffs to seize the
offenders goods-his beloved car, all his electronic gear. AND ANYTHING ELSE. ALL THE COURTS NEED IS DETERMINATION. The Home Office acknowledges
that shortage of prison space [they are sitting on £30,000,000 for over two years -earmarked
for a prison building programme -a site had already been designated -but nothing
done] -is making
difficulties. Yet it has scarcely touched its building budget for a couple
of years. But in any case, why not use some inhabitable islands around our coast for prison camps? Well, you see, then it would be hard for the prisoners to see their families. THAT WOULD BE NO BAD THING. Less contact with criminal
fathers would be a benefit for children -NOT A LOSS. We should not, unfortunately
look to new Home Secretary John Reid in the hope of sensible measures about
CRIME. He promises to match his hapless predecessors. The incompetence of the Home Office has been revealed in various instances because individuals in the department have leaked documents. They show, in Reid’s words, that the department is ‘not fit for purpose’- an odd and pompous phrase, incidentally. WHY NOT INCOMPETENT? So what does he do? He reaches
for a law- not one which will improve Home Office efficiency but one which will
keep it secret by imposing new penalties on WHISTLE BLOWERS. HE WANTS TO SHOOT THE
MESSENGERS. * * * [Font altered-bolding &
underlining used -comments in brackets] JULY/06
*
*
* [Latest Addition - June07] * * *
*
Daniel Hannan - Forming an OPPOSITION to the EU
*
VOTE MAY -2007
WITH THE ONLY PARTY WITH A MANDATE TO SET YOU FREE
THE UK INDEPENDENCE PARTY
TO RECLAIM YOUR DEMOCRACY DON'T VOTE FOR THE TRIPARTITE PARTIES IN WESTMINSTER BUT SMALL PARTIES THAT SPEAK THEIR MINDS WITHOUT SPIN AND LIES. *
ONLY WILL BRING DEMOCRACY BACK TO THE ENGLISH PEOPLE *
* MAY/07
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