Crime

There was recently a mass public party at which all sorts of offences were committed. As innocent attendees cut loose and jived, shadier actors took advantage. There was a burglary, a robbery, 19 drug offences, 26 acts of theft and no fewer than 30 acts of violence against individuals. There were also two sexual offences – shameful. What hell was this? Where did all this moral abasement occur? Must have been at the Notting Hill Carnival, right? Actually, no – it was at Glastonbury. Yes, at this year’s Glasto, famously the hangout of middle-class white folk who like rock, crimes were committed. In those tent cities, amid the thick haze of Mary Jane, things got stolen, people were punched, women were abused. So should we shut it down?

Whatever happened to the likes of the BBC’s Rough Justice and Channel 4’s Trial and Error? Why did human rights organisations such as Liberty and Justice stop campaigning on behalf of UK prisoners wrongfully jailed? Why are there fewer MPs plugging away on behalf of constituents they believe to have been victims of miscarriages of justice? All this activity seemed to be wound down after the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC) began its work in 1997. Outsiders were no longer needed to look into the criminal justice system, many believed, now that we had a one-stop shop for prisoners protesting against their convictions for crimes they insist they did not commit.

There is no doubt that the new government (and in particular the prisons minister, James Timpson) is faced with a serious prison population crisis. Original thinking and a willingness to challenge the system will be the only way out. As HM Chief Inspector of Prisons, I know this all too well. Last month I inspected Durham, a Georgian reception jail which regularly vies for the dubious honour of being the most overcrowded prison along with Leeds, Bedford and Wandsworth. Half of all prisoners are functionally illiterate and yet few are taught to read With remand populations (those who have yet to be convicted) at historic highs, reception prisons across the country are busier than ever.

Thanks to an underage relative who’d stolen my driving licence, I recently found myself ID-less at the local Co-op. I know the woman at the checkout reasonably well, so I said hi, enquired about her day and then asked if I could have my usual vape anyway. She had the decency to look shifty and said: ‘Sorry love.’ Did she not remember me and my ID from just a few days earlier? Was she senile? Did she hate me? I suspected that the reason she was unswayable was because she was bugged. She was wearing a body worn camera and the Co-op’s Security Operations Center was spying on us. The public is accustomed to, or at least aware of, the police’s use of body worn cameras (BWCs). But in recent years, the technology has been proliferating at a dizzying rate.

The Sentencing Council, consisting of various legal authorities, has told judges and magistrates to consider, when sentencing the young, their ‘difficult and/or deprived backgrounds or personal circumstances’. To what end? To induct the young into proper moral behaviour, Aristotle thought that family discipline should go hand in hand with the community’s laws, customs and education. But it was also possible for the young to receive bad training, on which Aristotle thundered: ‘It makes no small difference whether we form habits of one kind or another from our very youth; it makes a very great difference, or rather, it makes all the difference.

During lockdown, crime shot up around the country. Most cities have seen their numbers come down — most aside from our nation’s capital. Why? In our editorial, we ask what’s being done — it might not surprise you that the answer is “not much.” Matt McDonald, a resident of Navy Yard, one of the worst-hit areas, says that his neighborhood is a failed experiment in gentrification — and asks if help is on the way. And Tim Rice looks at why and how DC got to where it is right now. Elsewhere, Patrick Hauf does a ride-along with the Dallas Police Department, and finds an alternative approach to policing that could be a model for departments around the country.

Many years ago, for my Great Lives BBC radio programme, we recorded Jeremy Paxman’s championing of the life of Anthony Ashley Cooper, 7th Earl of Shaftesbury. It was an excellent choice and Mr Paxman persuasively laid out that great campaigner’s achievements in the reform of child-labour legislation and the lunacy laws. ‘As we look back baffled,’ I asked him, ‘by how civilised Victorians could even contemplate chaining the mentally ill to walls, or sending small boys up chimneys, what do you think future ages will lay, with comparable perplexity and horror, to our own age’s account?’ Paxman said he’d need notice of the question. I don’t. With no shadow of doubt it will be our prisons.