Tony Blair is a fascist

King Tony is continues to try and govern by headline, with the resultant war on civil liberties, now thinks that summary justice (why does that make me think of death squads? Oh yes) is the way to make the red tops love him. Much of the debate going on is about how he thinks that there should be less of that awkward proof as to whether someone actually did what they are accused of, and once they have been found guilty prison sentencing is apparently too lenient. He is wrong on both counts, but more to the point he is also trying to deal with the problem arse backwards.

The problem is nothing to do with courts and sentencing, it is to do with people committing crime. Once the crime has been committed the system has already failed. The courts and prisons are just there to try and clean up the mess afterwards, but the real solution is to stop the crime happening in the first place.

In the words of Sir Robert Peel:

The test of police efficiency is the absence of crime and disorder, not the visible evidence of police action in dealing with it.

There are very strong correlations between certain factors and people committing crime.

One is education, if you don't even have the educational ability to register an order or get the correct change in McDonalds then you are not going to have much in the way of legal career options.

Some 7 million adults in England - one in five adults - if given the alphabetical index to the Yellow Pages, cannot locate the page reference for plumbers. That is an example of functional illiteracy.

...

60% of people in prison suffer from functional illiteracy and/or innumeracy.

Another know correlation is with the most un-telegenic of all aspects of health care, mental health.

A study undertaken by the Office of National Statistics, for example, found that 7% of sentenced men, 10% of men on remand and 14% of women in both categories suffered from psychotic illness in the previous year as compared to 0.4% of the general adult population. (Fryers, T., Brugha, T. (1998) 'Severe mental illness in prisoners', British Medical Journal, Vol. 317, pp.1025-6). A 1996 study indicated that over 60% of unconvicted male prisoners held on remand were suffering from mental disorder and some of these were judged to have an immediate treatment need that was not being met. (Brooks, D., Taylor, C,. Gunn, J., Maden, A. (1996) ‘Point prevalence of mental disorder in unconvicted male prisoners in England and Wales’, British Medical Journal, Vol.313, pp.1524-7.)

An individuals mental health never going to be helped by being locked up in prison, and not just on people with a preexisting condition.

A better system of education that gives enough options that everybody can be educated to the best of their ability and a health system that does not focus on whatever the health minister of the day thinks will get them the best photo opportunity will therefore provide a better cure to the problem of crime than the bonfire of civil liberties so beloved by Blair. That will help reduce the number of people predisposed to crime, but what of crime itself?

There is one known, tried and tested way of reducing crime. You increase the risk of getting caught by putting more police on the streets. It works with the evidence being not just anecdotal like Henry Porter's piece in the Observer but hard statistical evidence such as by Steven Levitt in Freakonomics that he wrote with Stephen J Dubner. Sir Robert Peel understood this two centuries ago (so much for Blair's 21st century crime requiring 21st century methods), he also understood that the best way to get the most police on the street would be if everybody where the police:

Police, at all times, should maintain a relationship with the public that gives reality to the historic tradition that the police are the public and the public are the police; the police being only members of the public who are paid to give full-time attention to duties which are incumbent on every citizen in the interests of community welfare and existence.

Unfortuantly the ever centralising forces of so many governments, and ever expanding list of uncrimes have broken this link in such a way that may be hard to recover.

UPDATE

Dr Crippen tells us about the current state of mental health provision within the NHS. Being so media unfriendly it could be cut without any public uproar. So Thatcher did, replacing NHS mental health with Care in the Community, where they recieve no care and so end up a blight on the community.