Before
I continue, I would like to present the debate cut-and-pasted from the comments
section on the article’s page to give the proper context. Please note: all quotes are reproduced
exactly as they appear on the original page.
thurrocksgonedownhill – “We are all paying the price for weak namby pamby policies that don’t work. Lets bring back harsh penalties for these scum bags.”littlebopeep – “Absolutely terrible. Discipline should start in the home. Sadly many children have none and are allowed to develope into hooligans.”Valen (Myles) Cook – “Some people believe that harsh punishments deter criminals. There is plenty of evidence that they don’t. The only true deterrent is the threat of capture by the police which can’t happen under the Tories as they have cut police numbers leading to a criminal’s paradise. Of course, some people will ignore the evidence that is plentifully available if they can be bothered to look for it but there can’t be any people that stupid or lazy out there, can there?”littlebopeep – “So what should the penalty be. A tap on the hand and don’t do it again? Sorry, cannot agree. Many of these children who have knives are well under age. Where are their families?”thurrocksgonedownhill – “It would seem some on here would give them a new phone and trainers and tell them to play nicely… I guess that’s parasitic Labour voters for you.”Valen (Myles) Cook – “littlebopeep – Well that’s a very stupid thing to say and not what I said. I didn’t say let violent criminals off. I merely stated that harsher punishments don’t deter criminals and there is evidence to that effect. What does deter criminals is the risk of capture so more police are necessary. The current sentences are sufficient if we had the police officers is sufficient number to increase the risk of capture. And I don’t know why you included stuff about children with knives in response to me when I didn’t include any reference to them in my comment. Perhaps you should try reading people’s comments properly before you reply.”littlebopeep – “I suppose everyone is entitled to there opinion, but do feel that the threat of hanging might help.”Valen (Myles) Cook – “littlebopeep – I’m sorry but I was not offering my opinion. I was presenting the result of many studies on the role of punishment on criminals. The result was that only the fear of getting caught provides sufficient deterrence because many criminals believe that they won’t get caught so won’t suffer any punishment. Get more police on the streets and you’ll see a reduction in crime. If a criminal doesn’t get caught having a sentence of hanging or whatever has absolutely no effect at all. Not only is what I said a fact, it’s a bleeding obvious fact.”thurrocksgonedownhill – “Getting caught is really a deterrent…not. Going to prison is a badge of honour and all these studies are do gooder rubbish.Here’s a fact- TBC & The Police spend tax payers money banning this so called E 17 gang from Grays, well that really scared them big time. Members of the gang were then seen in the town and even seen making video’s a week or so later and continue to be seen in the town.“Maybe we should have another expensive study into the study that clearly didn’t tell them to play nicely.“Blinkered Labour voters for you I guess.”littlebopeep – “Sadly, common sense falls on deaf ears.”thurrocksgonedownhill – “Littlebopeep your absolutely right, Sadly we live in a namby pamby society that rewards failure.“People (in fact animals) who carry knifes and use them are taking another’s life and wrecking the lifes’ of the people left behind. Yet reading some of the comments on here from so called intelligent (sic) people you would be forgiven to believe that is ok.“Hard line sentences is the only thing these feral no goods will understand.We don’t need parasitic imbeciles telling us all is fine…it’s Tory cuts to blame.”
[http://www.yourthurrock.com/2019/03/10/series-knifepoint-robberies-chafford-hundred/ (Accessed 12 March
2019)]
As you
can see, a point I made was that harsh sentences aren’t a deterrent if the
chances of being caught and punished are low.
At the current time, with the massive cuts to the policing budget which
has seen a reduction of over 20,000 police officers on the streets of the UK
and an increase of 14% in overall crime in just the last 12 months (gun crime
up 20%, knife crime up 21%, robbery up 29%, vehicle theft up 18%, domestic
burglary up 32%, and stalking crimes up 36%), the chances of being caught are
low and getting lower all the time, especially as the number of police officers
is at the lowest level since 1985.
So, is
my point mere opinion on my part or does it have any intellectual weight behind
it? Well, as I have already stated,
there are studies that have proven that, although harsh sentences have some
deterrent effect, that effect is minimal compared to the chances of
capture. I wouldn’t ask you to take me
purely at my word, that would not be right and proper, so I am going to back up
my argument for more police on our streets being the only real effective
deterrent by quoting some verifiable facts and expert opinion.
In Deterrence in the Twenty-First Century
(2013), author Daniel S Nagin states that the main conclusions of his study
are “First, there is little evidence that increases in the length of already
long prison sentences yield general deterrent effects that are sufficiently
large to justify their social and economic costs…Second, on the basis of the
earlier noted Crime and justice
review (Nagin, Cullen, and Jonson 2009), I have concluded that there is little
evidence of a specific deterrent effect arising from the experience of
imprisonment compared with the experience of noncustodial sanctions such as
probation. Instead, the evidence
suggests that that reoffending is either unaffected or increased…Third, there
is substantial evidence that increasing the visibility of the police by hiring
more officers and allocating existing officers in ways that materially heighten
the perceived risk of apprehension can deter crimes. This evidence is consistent with the
perceptual deterrence literature that surveys individuals on sanction risk
perceptions and relates these perceptions to their actual or intended offending
behaviour. This literature finds that
perceived certainty of punishment is associated with reduced self-reported or
intended offending…Thus, I conclude, as have many prior reviews of deterrence
research, that evidence in support of the deterrent effect of various measures
of the certainty of punishment is far more convincing and consistent than for
the severity of punishment.” [Crime and
Justice Vol. 42, No. 1, Crime and Justice in America 1975–2025 (August
2013), pp. 199-263]
The
National Institute of Justice website uses Mr Nagin’s work as the basis of its
page called Five Things About Deterrence
in which they translate some of the language into a more user-friendly type and
boil down the entire article into five basic points. The five points are: 1) “The certainty of being caught is a vastly
more powerful deterrent than the punishment.
Research shows clearly that the chance of being caught is a vastly more
effective deterrent than even draconian punishment”, 2) “Sending an individual
convicted of a crime to prison isn’t a very effective way to deter crime”, 3)
“Police deter crime by increasing the perception that criminals will be caught
and punished”, 4) “Increasing the severity of punishment does little to deter
crime”, and 5) “There is no proof that the death penalty deters
criminals”. [https://nij.gov/five-things/pages/deterrence.aspx (Accessed 12 March
2019)] The last point is rather moot as
the UK doesn’t have a death penalty but does add something to our current
discussion.
On the
BBC Future website, the article The myth
behind long prison sentences by Bryan Lufkin (posted 15 May 2018) states
that: “Criminals seem to value the
future less than non criminals, one study found, meaning that long
sentences can seem “arbitrary”, and only work to deter up to a point. Education
played a role too, with lesser educated criminals seemingly less put off by a
harsher sentence.” [http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20180514-do-long-prison-sentences-deter-crime (Accessed 12 March
2019)]
In
their article Sentence Severity and
Crime: Accepting the Null Hypothesis, authors Anthony N Doob and Cheryl
Marie Webster stated that “The literature on the effects of sentence severity
on crime levels has been reviewed numerous times in the past twenty-five
years. Most reviews conclude that there
is little or no consistent evidence that harsher sanctions reduce crime rates
in Western populations.” [Crime and Justice
Vol. 30 (2003), pp. 143-195]
A
report from the National Research Council, The
Growth of Incarceration in the United States: Exploring Causes and Consequences
(2014), notes that “Evidence is limited on the crime prevention effects of most
of the policies that contributed to the post-1973 increase in incarceration
rates. Nevertheless, the evidence base
demonstrates that lengthy prison sentences are ineffective as a crime control
measure. Specifically, the incremental deterrent effect of increases in lengthy
prison sentences is modest at best.” [The Growth of Incarceration in the United
States: Exploring Causes and Consequences (2014), pp. 155] Please note:
You can pick up a free PDF copy of this report at https://www.nap.edu/catalog/18613/the-growth-of-incarceration-in-the-united-states-exploring-causes
So,
given all the evidence to the contrary, what are we to do to reduce crime on our
streets if harsher sentences aren’t going to do the job?
Well
surely it’s obvious to even the most ignorant reader – we need to have a
greater police presence to increase the chances of catching the criminals and
punishing them. However, how can we possibly
increase police numbers without increasing the police budget? We can’t.
The only way to increase police numbers and reduce crime is to stop
cutting the police budget as the Tories have been doing for the best part of a
decade and start to pump more money into the service.
Of
course, this only addresses actually catching criminals and we are still left
with the societal causes of crime beyond the basic greed inherent in human
nature. The same reasons that brought
about the vote for Brexit are responsible for the increase in crime that a lack
of police officers has caused – stagnant wages, lowering living standards,
increasing poverty, a lack of funding for public services that has resulted in
the shutting down of youth services which in turn has increased knife crime and
gang culture.
The
current age of austerity has exacerbated the already volatile tensions inherent
in society at the lower end of the socio-economic ladder and the longer
austerity goes on the more volatile things will become. Austerity was always an ideological project
by the Tories who were able to use the deficit and the global financial crash
that started in the US to push through their ideological plans to strip the UK
of its welfare system and National Health Service and reduce the State’s
obligations to its citizens. With
orgasmic fervour the Tories have reduced spending in every department and
created the powder keg that has seen such a large rise in the levels of crime
across the board. All of this they have
done in the name of “reducing the deficit” (which was supposed to take five
years and may now not be achieved in twenty) and paying off the UK debt, which
is ironic as, despite austerity and the deaths and poverty it has caused, the
debt has now risen to £2.1 trillion where it once sat at £979.8 billion as of
May 2010.
The
question to be asked is – if crime levels are increased by austerity (in the
form of lower police numbers and volatile social conditions brought on by cuts
to public services) and the national debt is actually rising, where has all
that money that has been added to the national debt gone to? Surely there’s enough money to increase
police funding and funding to all the services that could alleviate the
tensions in society and reduce crime?
It is
generally accepted that you can’t cut a nation’s way out of a deficit/debt
problem. Austerity doesn’t work. It is generally accepted that the only way
out of a financial problem at the State level is to invest in infrastructure,
in businesses, in education. Anything
else is folly, yet there seems to be no investment being made by the current
government and yet they borrow more and more, cut more and more and the UK
drowns under a tsunami of austerity-induced crime and national debt. Who exactly is benefitting from
austerity? One thing’s for sure, it
certainly isn’t the average person in the street and things will only get worse
as the worst in human nature is revealed by the desperation felt outside the
hallowed halls of Parliament.
Austerity
is a political choice. It will take an
act of political will to reverse it.
We have
a decision to make as a country – do we want to sink into a quagmire of crime
and hatred fuelled by austerity or do we want to do better and become the
better versions of ourselves that we could become if only we had the will to do
so?
Update: since I wrote the above article the
following statement was made by Institute for Fiscal Studies director Paul
Johnson: “If the chancellor uses his headroom to find an extra £15bn for public
services, he could say with more conviction that austerity is coming to an end.”
That
one statement provides enough evidence that austerity could be ended. The fact that it is not ending can therefore
only be a political choice made by the Tories.
Mr
Johnson also indicated that Brexit will negatively impact the economy meaning
that the current volatile social situation exacerbated by austerity probably
won’t get any better any time soon. Mr
Johnson stated: “There is a consensus that the economy would have been about 2
per cent bigger had the Brexit vote not occurred.”
He
continued: “In those circumstances the deficit would have been smaller still
and the fiscal room for manoeuvre greater. The end of austerity could already
have been rather more decisively with us.”
[https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/austerity-end-government-philip-hammond-ifs-report-a8822411.html (Accessed 14 March
2019)]
This
provides more evidence placing the blame for the current economic situation
solely in the hands of the Tories because it was the Tories, in trying to keep
their own party from splitting along Euro-sceptic/pro-European lines, who
brought about the EU Referendum that has split the UK along the only faultline
that hadn’t already been cynically exploited to divide society.
Austerity
and the damage it has caused was and always will be an act of political will by
the Tories. A choice that they could
roll back on now they apparently have £15 billion extra to pump into public
services but that they choose not to for their own ideological reasons.
