It is not surprising that most people think Britain has gone soft on law and order.
A major press poll published over the weekend revealed something that should surprise no one: that an overwhelming majority of people believe Britain has softened the rules of law and order.
They are particularly upset by the fact that prison sentences are now so often replaced by community punishment. They want longer and harsher prison sentences to be imposed.
As if on cue, the Sentencing Council appears to contradict the public.
The Council is an independent body, made up of judges and others involved in criminal justice, whose purpose is to produce consistency in the sentencing decisions of the courts.
Last week it produced a consultation paper on sentencing guidelines for drug offences, which proposed that some offenders convicted of supplying the most dangerous illegal drugs, such as heroin or cocaine, should be spared jail and instead given community service orders.
The flawed assumptions behind this proposal tell us much about the growing disorder that has gripped law and order in Britain.
It is true that community sentences are only suggested for those convicted of supplying small quantities of such drugs.
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But these “small” quantities include up to 50 grams of heroin or cocaine, enough for 1,000 doses of heroin or 1,000 lines of cocaine. This is a huge number of class A drug users.
The Sentencing Council’s reasoning is strange. It claims, for example, that prison should not be applied to “small-scale” traffickers who “have no prospects of profit” or “influence” in any chain of criminal activity.
What world do its members live in? Can anyone imagine a drug dealer distributing enough heroin or cocaine for a thousand doses without expecting any personal gain?
And the idea that any dealer operates in a vacuum, with no “influence” in a criminal chain, is frankly ridiculous. Big drug dealers rely on smaller dealers to distribute the product. They are all engaged in the same terrible process of exploitation and enslavement.
The Council’s main concern appears to be drug ‘mules’, mainly women, who are used to transport drugs (often by swallowing them in small plastic bags) to UK drug dealers from abroad.
As the Council notes, such people are often ignorant and exploited, and so it considers them more worthy of compassion than of censure.
But it is equally plausible to regard many other criminals as ignorant and exploited, and the fact is that such “mules” benefit from exploitation, not to mention the harm they inflict on society because of the activities of drug users.
In other words, the Council’s concern is directed exclusively at the welfare of offenders, rather than at the welfare of society and the need to protect it from the impact of illegal drugs. (On second thought, there is another obvious and no less unpleasant concern: the need to save money by reducing the need for prison places.)
Furthermore, his concern for the welfare of the “mules” makes no sense even from his own perspective, as he states that if “mules” are convicted of transporting large quantities of drugs, they should be sent to prison.
But if they are being so exploited, surely the more packets of heroin or cocaine they are forced to swallow, the greater their exploitation will be.
So, by the Council’s own logic, the more drugs they carry, the stronger the argument for not imprisoning them.
Absurd? Of course. But that is where the erroneous reasoning of the Sentencing Council’s consultation document leads.
These ‘small’ quantities include up to 50 grams of heroin or cocaine, enough for 1,000 doses of heroin or 1,000 lines of cocaine (photo posed by model)
The point he so conspicuously refuses to acknowledge is that any supply of drugs should surely carry a prison sentence.
It is true that some drug-related offences are more serious than others and should carry a harsher penalty, but drug trafficking is always so serious that the starting point of sentencing should invariably be a prison sentence.
The Council lives under the common illusion that small-time traffickers should be given low priority so that it can concentrate on catching the big guns in the drug world.
But the idea of a “Big Man” is little more than a pipe dream, since with so many consumers regularly selling some of their drugs, trafficking resembles an ever-expanding geometric pattern, with small-time dealers often becoming “Big Men” themselves.
The only way to end the growing scourge of drug use is to apply appropriate punishment to all drug dealers. Instead, the Sentencing Council’s proposal sends out yet another message that the law against illegal drugs should not be taken seriously.
Such dangerous signals are nothing new. Last week, a drug dealer who had been caught with a huge haul of drugs – including cocaine, ecstasy, three bin bags of cannabis and lethal methamphetamine worth £50,000 – was freed from jail by Judge Stephen Holt, who gave him a 12-month suspended sentence.
In 1967, Rolling Stones Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and Brian Jones were sentenced to prison terms of between three months and a year for cannabis possession alone, although following an outcry these sentences were later commuted to heavy fines.
But what a difference this is now, when only a third of dealers supplying class A drugs receive prison sentences.
The reason is that many important and good people have been influenced by the relentless influence of drug legalization propaganda, which has brainwashed them into believing that the main problem is not drugs themselves, but the law designed to control them.
And this, in turn, is part of a broader perception – currently embodied by none other than Justice Secretary Ken Clarke himself – that prison does not work and only leads to a “revolving door” of criminality.
The problem, of course, is that the preferred alternative to prison, community service orders, have an equally bad failure rate in keeping criminals on the straight and narrow, but with the added disadvantage that they provide the beleaguered public with no respite from those criminals’ activities.
The real reason there is such animosity towards imprisonment among our ruling elite is that they have come to believe that punishment itself is uncivilized. On the contrary: without punishment there can be no justice and therefore no civilized society.
This essential moral truth is still widely understood by the general public. That is why, when last weekend’s poll asked people to say whether punishment, containment, reform or deterrence was the most important function of prison, twice as many people chose punishment over containment, and even fewer people prioritized rehabilitation or deterrence.
And that’s why no less than 81 percent of the general public said the sentences were “too lenient.”
Yet despite such strong opinions, the public is dismissed as a group of hard-core atavistics by the more enlightened souls responsible for criminal justice policy.
However, it is these leaders who have lost sight of what justice really means. This is the main reason for the demoralization and loss of direction in matters of law and order.
The ruling class’s confused defeatism about prisons mirrors its confused defeatism about drugs. It believes that prison increases the likelihood of crime and that drug laws make drug-related crime worse.
But the truth is that the impact of incarceration has been eroded by increasingly shorter prison sentences.
And it is not the law that makes drug use a bigger problem, but rather the fact that the law is inconsistently enforced and its signals are fatally compromised.
Whether it’s drugs or crime in general, the real problem is the loss of moral compass among those responsible for ensuring our security. And that’s why the Sentencing Council’s proposals are likely to provoke even more despair among a general public who believe that, when it comes to law and order, their leaders have simply lost their way.
