THE FAILINGS OF OUR SYSTEM OF SUMMARY JUSTICE.

If the average reader were to consider custodial sentencing in the post war period, some 50 years ago, they would be stunned to learn that the vast majority of shoplifters, thieves, flashers and people of violence would have been expecting a custodial sentence in their visit to the Magistrates’ Courts.
Persistent offenders had virtually no chance of escaping prison.
Younger criminals may have been given ’a last chance’ with a lesser disposal but would not have expected to escape a second visit to the Courts unscathed.
I need hardly remind you that prison was a much more disagreeable place in those days although paradoxically, the company you had to keep was probably preferable to that found in prisons currently.
Had you told any member of the public in 1951, the year of my birth, that use of custody would be reduced by in excess of 80% for such offences in the coming decades, they would have thrown their hands aloft and predicted an astronomical increase in crime rates.
Time has proved this point.
The atrocious crime levels today make the lives of too many decent citizens an absolute misery. It would be overstating the case however, to make a case that our present leniency is the single cause of this social catastrophe as the situation is far more complex. Even so, the almost universal absence of fear of justice amongst the criminal classes is the major factor, especially when you note that this ‘fear’ has been replaced for so many with simple contempt.
The days when even the worst of mothers felt the need to warn their offspring of the frightening consequences of their actions are long departed. This had for centuries been a useful mechanism which helped to instil the seeds of conscience into the most unlikely of individuals. It also was their first introduction to the expectations that society had of them.Today our schools are too often deprived of this first step and reducing disciplinary levels, in tandem with the ever increasing levels of poor parenting, an anti-authority bias in so many families and the perception that ‘taking your child’s side’ against teacher or police officer is supportive, all combine to blur the lines between right and wrong.
The Marxist ‘infection’ of our social and probation services is worrying in the extreme.
Several years ago, I was horrified when I saw the political drivel being hammered into the hapless students in one university when I examined their Sociology Degree courses in some detail.
Political correctness was not sufficient. A darwinian slant that made us all entirely ‘products of our environment’ on the one hand and being ‘victims of the class system’ on the other managed to remove all basic requirements on the individual to accept responsibility for his or her actions.
From such a background we recruit generations of social workers of various types.
This point was reinforced when a colleague happened to be present in the home of two teenagers, both subject to a court order for callously burgling a neighbour’s house, when their Probation Officer made a routine visit.
Sitting to one side, and ignored, he was horrified to overhear three quarters of an hour of ‘counselling’ which consisted entirely of telling them ‘not to be upset’ and ‘it wasn’t their fault’. Some may wonder why we have problems!
The desire of the so-called ‘permissive elements’ to remove the idea of ‘retribution’ from the system and to deride it by mischievously re-labelling it ‘vengeance’ has been especially damaging. When such people speak, they do so as if ‘rehabilitation’ is the only aim in sentencing procedures in our courts. The imposition of justice is much broader and must set the parameters of ‘right and wrong’.
Any disposal which does not follow the principle of ‘the punishment fitting the crime’ is deleterious to the nation. Any punishment received which is less than the offence warrants undermines the entire authority of the rule of law.
There is a modern assumption which underpins the whole of Community Punishments that the offender wants to become a useful if not valuable member of society. Their arrest was of course, the catalyst for this epiphany.
The idea ignores the extensive amounts of support the average 20 year old recidivist will have been receiving; initially in school and eventually through court orders. The idea that the majority want to ‘improve’ is simply erroneous.
If you have a lifestyle supported by state benefits, petty crime, black economy tax free odd jobs and minor drug dealing, why would you want to give it up?
All you can replace it with is low grade work which involves you in having to get up in the mornings, curtails your freedom and makes you ‘a fool’.
It is unhelpful that the same support systems want these people to have access to ‘good jobs’ - hardly fair to those who have worked hard academically to progress or those who have laboured in unskilled work and have struggled to make an honest living.
Living in a spiritually bankrupt society wherein the ‘liberal elite’ has decided to ‘abolish God’ and absolutes - aided and abetted by the Liberal Church - it is no great surprise that we have produced a hedonistic society where ‘rights’ are not matched by ‘responsibilities’.
We perhaps have entitlements to food, shelter, clean water, medicine and education but do we have the right to have TVs, computers, electronic goods, holidays etc?
It is my contention that we should work for the extras and this is an attitude that society as well as parents must take on board if any morality is to be re-established.
Gone are virtues such as ‘decency’ and ‘thrift’ only to be replaced with vague sentiments opposing assorted ‘...isms’ and embracing half-baked, wispy, green sound bites.
No. There is no incentive to abandon crime whatsoever. All persistent criminals recognise that the maximum sentence they can usually receive in a summary court, having pleaded guilty and having wisely admitted to some extra offences to be taken into account, is just sixteen weeks, less time spent on remand and with eight weeks automatically off for ’acceptable’ behaviour in prison. No astonishment then that ‘short prison sentences do not work’. They are not ‘short’, they are derisory.
Until offenders see that Community Punishments are truly rigorous and failure to complete them guarantees a substantial period in prison, they are doomed as a realistic alternative.
Of course there are always some who will benefit enormously from a Community Rehabilitation Order, a Community Punishment Order or even a Drug Treatment and Testing Order but let us not be fooled into thinking that these act as a panacea for the majority of hardened criminals.
Anybody who has perused a criminal record more than half an inch thick can be in little doubt.
The number of ‘last chances’ built into the system is horrendous.
The ‘message’ being sent out is that we are prepared to tolerate criminal behaviour - and such people need little prompting!
My first response to ASBOs was extremely positive but the predicted ‘backing off’ from prison becoming near automatic for breach has already begun and so they are likely soon to be as useless as any other toothless disposal.
Zero Tolerance from police is of little use if not backed up by the Courts.
Crime now blights the lives of millions and affects the lives of tens of millions even if, at its most trivial level, this only manifests itself as extra charges on insurance policies and a levy on supermarket goods to cover shoplifting losses.
Whatever happens we must recognise that we are in a war. It is about time we began to plan to win.