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UK: Real crime with fake justice



 
 
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  #1  
Old August 19th, 2006, 02:22 PM posted to alt.activism.death-penalty,rec.travel.europe,talk.politics.misc,uk.politics.misc,aus.politics
PJ O'Donovan[_1_]
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Posts: 377
Default UK: Real crime with fake justice

Europeans are so shocked by how many prisoners there are in America,
but at least we put them in prison, unlike in Britain. Dalrymple fails
to mention gun control as another reason for so much crime,


"Theodore Dalrymple is probably best known for his weekly columns in
The Spectator and his essays in the American quarterly City Journal. He
is a psychiatric doctor working in an inner city area in Britain where
he is attached to a large hospital and a prison. His columns report on
the lifestyles and ways of thinking of Britain's growing underclass,
and in his latest book, Life at the Bottom, he warns that this
underclass culture is spreading through the whole society."


Oh, to be in England



Real Crime, Fake Justice
Theodore Dalrymple

"For the last 40 years, government policy in Britain, de facto if not
always de jure, has been to render the British population virtually
defenseless against criminals and criminality. Almost alone of British
government policies, this one has been supremely effective: no Briton
nowadays goes many hours without wondering how to avoid being
victimized by a criminal intent on theft, burglary, or violence.

An unholy alliance between politicians and bureaucrats who want to keep
prison costs to a minimum, and liberal intellectuals who pretend to see
in crime a natural and understandable response to social injustice,
which it would be a further injustice to punish, has engendered a
prolonged and so far unfinished experiment in leniency that has debased
the quality of life of millions of people, especially the poor. Every
day in our newspapers we read of the absurd and dangerous leniency of
the criminal-justice system. On April 21, for example, even the
Observer (one of the bastions of British liberalism responsible for the
present situation) gave prominence to the official report into the case
of Anthony Rice, who strangled and then stabbed Naomi Bryant to death.

Rice, it turned out, had been assaulting women since 1972. He had been
convicted for assaulting or raping a total of 15 women before murdering
Naomi Bryant, and it is a fair supposition that he had assaulted or
raped many more who did not go to the police. In 1982, he grabbed a
woman by the throat, held a knife to her, and raped her. Five years
later, while out of prison on home leave, he grabbed a woman, pushed
her into a garden, held a knife to her, and raped her for an hour.
Receiving a life sentence, he was transferred to an open prison in 2002
and then released two years later on parole as a low-risk parolee. He
received housing in a hostel for ex-prisoners in a village whose
inhabitants had been told, to gain their acquiescence, that none of the
residents there was violent; five months after his arrival, he murdered
Naomi Bryant. In pronouncing another life sentence on him, the judge
ordered that he should serve at least 25 years: in other words, even
now the law has not quite thrown away the key.

Only five days later, the papers reported that 1,023 prisoners of
foreign origin had been released from British prisons between 1999 and
2006 without having been deported. Among them were 5 killers, 7
kidnappers, 9 rapists and 39 other sex offenders, 4 arsonists, 41
burglars, 52 thieves, 93 robbers, and 204 drug offenders. Of the 1,023
prisoners, only 106 had since been traced. The Home Office, responsible
for both prisons and immigration, still doesn't know how many of the
killers, arsonists, rapists, and kidnappers are at large; but it admits
that most of them will never be found, at least until they are caught
after committing another offense. Although these revelations forced the
Home Secretary to resign, in fact the foreign criminals had been
treated only as British criminals are treated. At least we can truly
say that we do not discriminate in our leniency.

Scandal has followed scandal. A short time later, we learned that
prisoners had been absconding from one open prison, Leyhill, at a rate
of two a week for three years-323 in total since 1999, among them 22
murderers. This outrage came to light only when a senior policeman in
the area of Leyhill told a member of Parliament that there had been a
crime wave in the vicinity of the prison. The member of Parliament
demanded the figures in the House of Commons; otherwise they would have
remained secret.

None of these revelations, however, would have surprised a man called
David Fraser, who has just published a book entitled A Land Fit for
Criminals-the land in question being Great Britain, of course. Far
from being mistakes-for mistakes repeated so often cease to be mere
mistakes-all these occurrences are in full compliance with general
policy in Britain with regard to crime and criminality.

Fraser was a probation officer for more than a quarter of a century. He
began to doubt the value of his work in terms of preventing crime and
therefore protecting the public, but he at first assumed that, as a
comparatively lowly official in the criminal-justice system, he was too
mired in the grainy everyday detail to see the bigger picture. He
assumed also that those in charge not only knew what they were doing
but had the public interest at heart.

Eventually, however, the penny dropped. Fraser's lack of success in
effecting any change in the criminals under his supervision, and thus
in reducing the number of crimes that they subsequently committed, to
the great misery of the general public, was not his failure alone but
was general throughout the system. Even worse, he discovered that the
bureaucrats who ran the system, and their political masters, did not
care about this failure, at least from the point of view of its impact
on public safety; careerist to the core, they were only concerned that
the public should not become aware of the catastrophe. To this end,
they indulged in obfuscation, statistical legerdemain, and outright
lies in order to prevent the calamity that public knowledge of the
truth would represent for them and their careers.

The collective intellectual dishonesty of those who worked in the
system so outraged Fraser-and the Kafkaesque world in which he found
himself, where nothing was called by its real name and language tended
more to conceal meaning than to convey it, so exasperated him-that,
though not a man apt to obtrude upon the public, he determined to write
a book. It took him two and a half years to do so, based on 20 years of
research, and it is clear from the very first page that he wrote it
from a burning need to expose and exorcise the lies and evasions with
which he lived for so long, lies and evasions that helped in a few
decades transform a law-abiding country with a reputation for civility
into the country with the highest crime rate in the Western world, with
an ever-present undercurrent of violence in daily life. Like Luther,
Fraser could not but speak out. And, as events unfolded, his book has
had a publishing history that is additionally revealing of the state of
Britain today.

By example after example (repetition being necessary to establish that
he has not just alighted on an isolated case of absurdity that might be
found in any large-scale enterprise), Fraser demonstrates the
unscrupulous lengths to which both bureaucrats and governments have
gone to disguise from the public the effect of their policies and
decisions, carried out with an almost sadistic indifference to the
welfare of common people.

He shows that liberal intellectuals and their bureaucratic allies have
left no stone unturned to ensure that the law-abiding should be left as
defenseless as possible against the predations of criminals, from the
emasculation of the police to the devising of punishments that do not
punish and the propagation of sophistry by experts to mislead and
confuse the public about what is happening in society, confusion
rendering the public helpless in the face of the experimentation
perpetrated upon it.

The police, Fraser shows, are like a nearly defeated occupying colonial
force that, while mayhem reigns everywhere else, has retreated to safe
enclaves, there to shuffle paper and produce bogus information to
propitiate their political masters. Their first line of defense is to
refuse to record half the crime that comes to their attention, which
itself is less than half the crime committed. Then they refuse to
investigate recorded crime, or to arrest the culprits even when it is
easy to do so and the evidence against them is overwhelming, because
the prosecuting authorities will either decline to prosecute, or else
the resultant sentence will be so trivial as to make the whole
procedure (at least 19 forms to fill in after a single arrest)
pointless.

In any case, the authorities want the police to use a sanction known as
the caution-a mere verbal warning. Indeed, as Fraser points out, the
Home Office even reprimanded the West Midlands Police Force for
bringing too many apprehended offenders to court, instead of merely
giving them a caution. In the official version, only minor crimes are
dealt with in this fashion: but as Fraser points out, in the year 2000
alone, 600 cases of robbery, 4,300 cases of car theft, 6,600 offenses
of burglary, 13,400 offenses against public order, 35,400 cases of
violence against the person, and 67,600 cases of other kinds of theft
were dealt with in this fashion-in effect, letting these 127,900
offenders off scot-free. When one considers that the police clear-up
rate of all crimes in Britain is scarcely more than one in 20 (and even
that figure is based upon official deception), the liberal intellectual
claim, repeated ad nauseam in the press and on the air, that the
British criminal-justice system is primitively retributive is absurd.

At every point in the system, Fraser shows, deception reigns. When a
judge sentences a criminal to three years' imprisonment, he knows
perfectly well (as does the press that reports it) that in the vast
majority of cases the criminal in question will serve 18 months at the
very most, because he is entitled automatically, as of right, to a
suspension of half his sentence. Moreover, under a scheme of early
release, increasingly used, prisoners serve considerably less than half
their sentence. They may be tagged electronically under a system of
home curfew, intended to give the public an assurance that they are
being monitored: but the electronic tag stays on for less than 12 hours
daily, giving criminals plenty of opportunity to follow their careers.
Even when the criminals remove their tags (and it is known that
thousands are removed or vandalized every year) or fail to abide by
other conditions of their early release, those who are supposedly
monitoring them do nothing whatever, for fear of spoiling the
statistics of the system's success. When the Home Office tried the
tagging system with young criminals, 73 percent of them were
reconvicted within three months. The authorities nevertheless decided
to extend the scheme. The failure of the British state to take its
responsibilities seriously could not be more clearly expressed.

Fraser draws attention to the deeply corrupt system in Britain under
which a criminal, once caught, may ask for other offenses that he has
committed to be "taken into consideration." (Criminals call these
offenses T.I.C.s.) This practice may be in the interests of both the
criminal and the police, but not in those of the long-suffering public.
The court will sentence the criminal to further prison terms that run
concurrently, not consecutively, to that imposed for the index offense:
in other words, he will in effect serve the same sentence for 50
burglaries as for one burglary, and he can never again face charges for
the 49 burglaries that have been "taken into consideration."
Meanwhile, the police can preen themselves that they have "solved"
50 crimes for the price of one.

One Probation Service smokescreen that Fraser knows from personal
experience is to measure its own effectiveness by the proportion of
criminals who complete their probation in compliance with court
orders-a procedural outcome that has no significance whatever for the
safety of the public. Such criminals come under the direct observation
of probation officers only one hour a week at the very most. What they
do the other 167 hours of the week the probation officers cannot
possibly know. Unless one takes the preposterous view that such
criminals are incapable of telling lies about their activities to their
probation officers, mere attendance at the probation office is no
guarantee whatever that they are now leading law-abiding lives.

But even if completion of probation orders were accepted as a surrogate
measure of success in preventing re-offending, the Probation
Service's figures have long been completely corrupt-and for a very
obvious reason. Until 1997, the probation officers themselves decided
when noncompliance with their directions was so egregious that they
"breached" the criminals under their supervision and returned them
to the courts because of such noncompliance. Since their own
effectiveness was measured by the proportion of probation orders
"successfully" completed, they had a very powerful motive for
disregarding the noncompliance of criminals. In such circumstances, all
activity became strictly pro forma, with no purpose external to itself.

While the government put an end to this particular statistical
legerdemain, probation orders still go into the statistics as
"successfully completed" if they reach their official termination
date-even in many cases if the offender gets arrested for committing
further offenses before that date. Only in this way can the Home Office
claim that between 70 and 80 percent of probation orders are
"successfully completed."

In their effort to prove the liberal orthodoxy that prison does not
work, criminologists, government officials, and journalists have
routinely used the lower reconviction rates of those sentenced to
probation and other forms of noncustodial punishment (the word
"punishment" in these circumstances being used very loosely) than
those imprisoned. But if the aim is to protect the law-abiding, a
comparison of reconviction rates of those imprisoned and those put on
probation is irrelevant. What counts is the re-offending rate-a point
so obvious that it is shameful that Fraser should have not only to make
it but to hammer it home repeatedly, for the politicians, academics,
and journalistic hangers-on have completely obscured it.

By definition, a man in prison can commit no crimes (except against
fellow prisoners and prison staff). But what of those out in the world
on probation? Of 1,000 male criminals on probation, Fraser makes clear,
about 600 will be reconvicted at least once within the two years that
the Home Office follows them up for statistical purposes. The rate of
detection in Britain of all crimes being about 5 percent, those 1,000
criminals will actually have committed not 600, but at least 12,000
crimes (assuming them to have been averagely competent criminals chased
by averagely incompetent police). Even this is not quite all. Since
there are, in fact, about 150,000 people on probation in Britain, it
means that at least 1.8 million crimes-more than an eighth of the
nation's total-must be committed annually by people on probation,
within the very purview of the criminal-justice system, or very shortly
after they have been on probation. While some of these crimes might be
"victimless," or at least impersonal, research has shown that these
criminals inflict untold misery upon the British population: misery
that they would not have been able to inflict had they been in prison
for a year instead of on probation.

To compare the reconviction rates of ex-prisoners and people on
probation as an argument against prison is not only irrelevant from the
point of view of public safety but is also logically absurd. Of course
the imprisoned will have higher reconviction rates once they get out of
jail-not because prison failed to reform them, but because it is the
most hardened, incorrigible, and recidivist criminals who go to prison.
Again, this point is so obvious that it is shameful that anyone should
have to point it out; yet politicians and others continue to use the
reconviction rates as if they were a proper basis for deciding policy.

Relentless for hundreds of pages, Fraser provides examples of how the
British government and its bloated and totally ineffectual bureaucratic
apparatus, through moral and intellectual frivolity as well as plain
incompetence, has failed in its elementary and sole inescapable duty:
to protect the lives and property of the citizenry. He exposes the
absurd prejudice that has become a virtually unassailable orthodoxy
among the intellectual and political elite: that we have too many
prisoners in Britain, as if there were an ideal number of prisoners,
derived from a purely abstract principle, at which, independent of the
number of crimes committed, we should aim. He describes in full detail
the moral and intellectual corruption of the British criminal-justice
system, from police decisions not to record crimes or to charge
wrongdoers, to the absurdly light sentences given after conviction and
the administrative means by which prisoners end up serving less than
half their time, irrespective of their dangerousness or the likelihood
that they will re-offend.

According to Fraser, at the heart of the British idiocy is the
condescending and totally unrealistic idea-which, however, provides
employment opportunities for armies of apparatchiks, as well as being
psychologically gratifying-that burglars, thieves, and robbers are
not conscious malefactors who calculate their chances of getting away
with it, but people in the grip of something rather like a mental
disease, whose thoughts, feelings, and decision-making processes need
to be restructured. The whole criminal-justice system ought therefore
to act in a therapeutic or medical, rather than a punitive and
deterrent, fashion. Burglars do not know, poor things, that
householders are upset by housebreaking, and so we must educate and
inform them on this point; and we must also seek to persuade them of
something that all their experience so far has taught them to be false,
namely that crime does not pay.

All in all, Fraser's book is a searing and unanswerable (or at least
so far unanswered) indictment of the British criminal-justice system,
and therefore of the British state. As Fraser pointed out to me, the
failure of the state to protect the lives and property of its citizens,
and to take seriously its duty in this regard, creates a politically
dangerous situation, for it puts the very legitimacy of the state
itself at risk. The potential consequences are incalculable, for the
failure might bring the rule of law itself into disrepute and give an
opportunity to the brutal and the authoritarian.

You might have thought that any publisher would gratefully accept a
book so urgent in its message, so transparently the product of a
burning need to communicate obvious but uncomfortable truths of such
public interest, conveyed in such a way that anyone of reasonable
intelligence might understand them. Any publisher, you would think,
would feel fortunate to have such a manuscript land on his desk. But
you would be wrong, at least as far as Britain is concerned.

So uncongenial was Fraser's message to all right-thinking Britons
that 60 publishers to whom he sent the book turned it down. In a
country that publishes more than 10,000 books monthly, not many of
which are imperishable masterpieces, there was no room for it or for
what it said, though it would take no great acumen to see its
commercial possibilities in a country crowded with crime victims. So
great was the pressure of the orthodoxy now weighing on the minds of
the British intelligentsia that Fraser might as well have gone to Mecca
and said that there is no God and that Mohammed was not His prophet. Of
course, no publisher actually told him that what he said was
unacceptable or unsayable in public: his book merely did not "fit the
list" of any publisher. He was the victim of British publishing's
equivalent of Mafia omerta.

Fortunately, he did not give up, as he sometimes thought of doing. The
61st publisher to whom he sent the book accepted it. I mean no
disrespect to her judgment when I say that it was her personal
situation that distinguished her from her fellow publishers: for her
husband's son by a previous marriage had not long before been
murdered in the street, stabbed by a drug-dealing Jamaican immigrant,
aged 20, who had not been deported despite his criminal record but
instead allowed to stay in the country as if he were a national
treasure to be at all costs cherished and nurtured. Indeed, in court,
his lawyer presented him as an unemployed painter and decorator, the
victim of racial prejudice (a mitigating circumstance, of course), a
view that the prosecution did not challenge, even though the killer had
somehow managed alchemically to transmute his unemployment benefits
into a new convertible costing some $54,000.

The maternal grandmother of the murdered boy, who had never been ill in
her life, died of a heart attack a week after his death, and so the
funeral was a double one. It is difficult to resist the conclusion that
the killer killed not one but two people. He received a sentence of
eight years-which, in effect, will be four or five years.

I asked the publisher the impossible question of whether she would have
published the book if someone close to her had not had such firsthand
experience of the frivolous leniency of the British criminal-justice
system. She said she thought so: but what is beyond dispute is that the
murder made her publication of the book a certainty.

A Land Fit for Criminals has sold well and has been very widely
discussed, though not by the most important liberal newspapers, which
would find the whole subject in bad taste. But the book's publishing
history demonstrates how close we have come to an almost totalitarian
uniformity of the sayable, imposed informally by right-thinking people
in the name of humanity, but in utter disregard for the truth and the
reality of their fellow citizens' lives. Better that they, the
right-thinking, should feel pleased with their own rectitude and
broadmindedness, than that millions should be freed of their fear of
robbery and violence, as in crime-ridden, pre-Giuliani New York. Too
bad Fraser's voice had to be heard over someone's dead body."

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  #2  
Old August 19th, 2006, 03:08 PM posted to alt.activism.death-penalty,rec.travel.europe,talk.politics.misc,uk.politics.misc,aus.politics
Padraig Breathnach
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 1,358
Default UK: Real crime with fake justice

"PJ O'Donovan" wrote:

More C&P from unidentified sources


Peej, you are usurping other people's intellectual property rights.
That is dishonest. If you want to post provocative ****, you should at
least write your own.

Or, better, **** off.

--
PB
The return address has been MUNGED
My travel writing: http://www.iol.ie/~draoi/
  #3  
Old August 19th, 2006, 03:21 PM posted to alt.activism.death-penalty,rec.travel.europe,talk.politics.misc,uk.politics.misc,aus.politics
Runge
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 2,243
Default UK: Real crime with fake justice

evleth does that everyday and you don't even tell him off once

"Padraig Breathnach" a écrit dans le message de
news: ...
"PJ O'Donovan" wrote:

More C&P from unidentified sources


Peej, you are usurping other people's intellectual property rights.
That is dishonest. If you want to post provocative ****, you should at
least write your own.

Or, better, **** off.

--
PB
The return address has been MUNGED
My travel writing:
http://www.iol.ie/~draoi/


 




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