UK: Government ineffective over crime

[Oldbillplod]

Sack the lot of them that's what I say.

Britain's law and order policies are among the least effective in Europe, a report claimed. Independent think-tank Civitas said the Government is failing to take the most basic measures to persuade offenders to go straight, such as getting them off drugs and providing basic qualifications.

Prime Minister Tony Blair has a tendency to "opt for the clever use of words" - such as his famous slogan "tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime" - rather than confront the real problems, it said.

As a result, the UK is "in danger of settling down to being a high crime society", the paper warned.

"Despite the blunt rhetoric of the Blunkett era, the dominant influence at every stage has remained a utopian dislike of prison, a naive view about how hardened offenders can be rehabilitated and an underlying lack of respect for the mass of people," said the report.

Ministers are taking false comfort from crime rates which they present as falling to record lows, yet are actually just dropping from an artificially high peak in the mid-1990s, it said.

The Home Office also "distorts" evidence on reoffending, it claimed, by using comparing reoffending rates of prison sentences with community sentences, when the data is actually incomparable.

According to Council of Europe figures, England and Wales had the fourth highest crime rate out of 39 countries, with 9,817 offences per 100,000 of population - more than double the 4,333 average, it noted.

By 1981, crime was 10 times what it had been in the 1950s, then levels accelerated during the late 1980s to early 1990s, but began to fall in about 1993, said the document.

The Home Office's own research had concluded a number of the Government's crime-fighting schemes were not reducing crime, the report went on. For example, Offending Behaviour Programmes such as anger management courses costing £2,000 each had not reduced crime, and 84% of yobs placed on Intensive Supervision and Surveillance Programmes - which have cost at least £45 million since 2001 - were reconvicted within 12 months of starting.