Victim stop

A few days ago, Daniel Hannan wrote:

There will always be editors who want the mothers of fallen Servicemen to comment on whether we should be in Afghanistan or who want Doreen Lawrence to be the final arbiter of the government’s policy on race. Still, here is a hard thing that needs saying: victims deserve our sympathy and our respect, but they are no more qualified than anyone else to determine what the law should be.

Most of those brandishing the ‘victims test’ in response to Leveson would be horrified at the suggestion that, say, the parents of a murdered child should decide whether the killer deserved the death penalty. They would point out, correctly, that such parents are emotionally involved, and can’t make a disinterested assessment of what constitutes justice.

An excellent illustration was provided on BBC Breakfast this morning by Jane Sherriff of Bottle Stop.

Following her husband's murder, she has called for all glasses and glass bottles to be BANNED in pubs and clubs after 9pm.

Safer than a pint glass

Personally, I think we should go further. Fights can break out in restaurants too, so it would be much safer if we were all required to use plastic cutlery, just like in cattle class on aeroplanes.

DK: with this manacle, I thee wed

When I saw the story on BBC Breakfast about new laws on the way to combat 'forced marriages', I felt I should blog about it. Thankfully, DK has saved me the trouble:

Over at the Commentator, Hannah Stuart has lauded Dave Cameron's plans to make forced marriage illegal.

In a speech on immigration today, Prime Minister David Cameron announced plans to criminalise forced marriage, a move that is likely to have a strong impact on tackling the wider issue of honour-based violence in this country.

Forced marriage should not be conflated with arranged marriage: individuals enter into arranged marriages voluntarily; whereas people forced into marriage are usually tricked into going abroad, physically threatened and/or emotionally blackmailed to do so.

No, Hannah—no, no, no!

One of the tendencies that we all used to excoriate NuLabour for was their mania for making law after law after law.

"Don't make more laws," we cried. "Just bloody well enforce the ones that we already have!"

The same is precisely true for this case. Much as I deplore forced marriages, the laws to tackle such things are already on the statute books: both kidnapping and slavery are illegal already (as defined in a number of different offences)—simply enforce the laws that we already have!

And I don't care whether this will help tackle the "wider issue of honour-based violence in this country": assault, rape and murder are already illegal—once again, simply enforce the laws that we already have!

He concludes:

Prosecute them as rapists; prosecute them as women beaters; prosecute them as murders ... charge and convict these scum under the existing laws, so that they understand that they are not exempt from the law of this land.

And, in the name of all that's unholy, Cameron, fulfil your own promises and start cutting some laws—not imposing more!

I couldn't say it better.

Gabb: reforming criminal justice

Sean Gabb has some good ideas for reforming our criminal justice system into one that properly deters criminals, while leaving the rest of us alone.

First, we need to abolish every so-called crime that doesn’t have an identifiable victim. This means relegalising drugs for adults, and respecting freedom of speech and association. It also means ignoring acts that may be preparations for crime, but are not in themselves attacks on life and property. It isn’t the business of the law if people smoke dope, or speak ill of minorities or refuse to do business with them, or if people keep guns at home, or collect books about bomb-making, or if they bribe foreign politicians, or even get involved in plots to kill them. Enforcing these laws leads straight to a police state and soaks up oceans of our money that could and should be spent on catching actual thieves and violent criminals.

Second, we need to go back to all those old common law rules that used to protect the innocent. We need the right to silence, and peremptory challenge of jurors – we need to stop the drift away from trial by jury. We need the rule against hearsay evidence, and the full presumption of innocence. Cutting down on these protections doesn’t make it easier to punish the guilty. It just enables more miscarriages of justice.

Third, we need to make sure that those found guilty of the remaining crimes are effectively punished. The idea that prison can reform bad character is stupid. People are what they are. If they go wrong, they should be punished in ways that the rest of us think just, and that scare them from reoffending.

It seems like a harder line than his previous post (Is Prison too Soft?). The idea of compensating victims has some merit, but as Gabb notes in his more recent article, compensation must go beyond simple replacement of the stolen goods:

For example, you’ve burgled me. Well, you’ve cost me £3,000 for lost property, plus £5,000 for the fear and anxiety of a violated home. So you pay me £8,000. If you don’t have the money, you’re set to work on digging the roads or stitching mailbags until you’ve earned it.

This is important not just for the "fear and anxiety", but because we have far less than a 100% conviction rate. A rational thief, if he judges that he has only a 1 in 100 chance of getting caught, would happily continue stealing unless he were forced to repay more than 100 times the value of the goods stolen. That could mean a lot of ditch digging and mailbag stitching. It also feels a bit too businesslike, as if there's nothing wrong with stealing so long as compensation is made.

Gabb does seem sympathetic to corporal punishment for violent offenders:

If you knocked me on the head when I found you in my home, you pay much more – and get a sound beating as well. After that, you’re set free.

I too think this might not be such a bad idea, and I'd be happy for the lashing to be conducted in public, but I imagine most people in modern Britain would find it a bit too barbaric.

What is clearly a stupid idea is locking criminals away with other criminals (some worse than themselves). In prison they experience an alternative morality, surrounded by people with no respect for the law. They become more callous and brutal, perhaps pick up a drug addiction, and meet future partners in crime.

Personally, I think prison done properly can play an important part in deterrence and rehabilitation. I'd like every prisoner's initial stay to be in solitary confinement. Let someone spend a 6 months in a windowless room, soundproof room, with bland food served by machines, and not even guards to talk to. Then they may begin to appreciate the benefits of human society. Let them then be released into a school-like prison, with the strictest standards of discipline. They would be taught the old fashioned way, to read, write, dress, and speak properly. They would have private cells, but unadorned with personal items. Any sign of disrespect to guards or fellow prisoners would earn them another spell in solitary. Contact with friends and relatives from the outside would only be allowed after many months, and these meetings would be closely monitored, with no physical contact possible. Interaction with fellow prisoners would be strictly limited to the classroom environment. Gradually, as the release date approaches, prisoners could be transferred to new units that more closely resemble the outside world, but any regression would still earn them a new spell in solitary.

Prison doesn't currently work, but it can be made to.

Justice?

Yesterday, James Delingpole wrote:

The law-abiding public are angry, of that there’s no doubt; and what’s clear is that they don’t want the thugs and agitators responsible for last week’s outrages let off the hook. But when they want tough sentencing, they want it for people like the thugs who steamed into the Ledbury restaurant and robbed the diners at knifepoint; the kind who burned down the Reeves store in Croydon; who mowed down those three young men in Birmingham. Not for people like the student who opportunistically helped himself for £3.50 of bottled water as he passed a looted store and ended up being sentenced to 18 months in prison. Not only is that sentence going to ruin a man’s life and cost the taxpayer at least £40,000 in valuable jail space but it creates the disconcerting impression that our justice system is arbitrary, cruel and out of touch.

And though I don't condone theft even of a bottle of water, it is indeed absurd that it should receive a harsher sentence during the 'riots' than at any other time.

Today, via DK, I discovered an excellent post from Bella Gerens:

From the Telegraph via Tim Worstall:

Jordan Blackshaw, 20, and Perry Sutcliffe-Keenan, 22, were jailed for four years each for inciting the disorder on Facebook despite both being of previous good character.

From the same Telegraph article:

A fourth defendant, Linda Boyd, 31, who has 62 previous convictions, was given a 10 month jail term suspended for two years after she was caught trying to drag away a £500 haul of alcohol, cigarettes and tobacco.

I’m not sure I need to make this comment, but: what kind of justice is this when two people of previous good character receive lengthy custodial sentences for making remarks on Facebook, but a third person who has a long, long history of criminal behaviour is given a suspended sentence for being caught with stolen goods?

I understand that these were different courts with different judges in different regional jurisdictions, but there still seems to be a massive disparity in the interpretation of sentencing guidelines here.

She concludes:

It is outrageous that remarks on Facebook merit a longer, harsher jail sentence than some rapes and murders, let alone theft and looting.

But what is really outrageous is that making remarks on Facebook can be criminalised at all. Perhaps Jordan Blackshaw and Perry Sutcliffe-Keenan can band together with Paul Chambers and his supporters to help stamp out this fascist British tendency toward criminalisation of speech.

Indeed!

To my admittedly prejudiced eye, Blackshaw and Sutcliffe-Keenan do look like a couple of thugs.



Perhaps they're guilty of many crimes for which they have not been convicted. But the crime for which they've actually been convicted shouldn't exist at all.

I'm reminded of a characteristically eloquent post by Tom Paine from February 2009: Should "egging on" be a crime?.

Now it seems you don't even need to be physically present to be held liable for the actions of others. We live in dark times.

International law gone wrong

On Monday, the BBC reported that the International Criminal Court had issued an arrest warrant for Muammar Gaddafi

For alleged criminal responsibility for the commission of murder and persecution as crimes against humanity from 15 February 2011 onwards

Today, Daniel Hannan has posted an excellent article in response:

International law has ceased to be international. Where it used to be about relations among states, it is nowadays about human rights violations within states – which suits its practitioners down to the ground, as it gives them virtually unlimited jurisdiction.

For hundreds of years, we operated on the basis of the clearly understood principle that crimes were the responsibility of the states on whose territories they were alleged to have taken place. International law applied only to those issues which were, by their nature, international. William Blackstone saw it as covering just three areas: safe conduct passes; the treatment of ambassadors; and piracy on the high seas.

Under this traditional definition, Muammar Gaddafi might have been arraigned at virtually any point in the 1980s or 1990s. He practised the modern equivalent of piracy, sponsoring international terrorism. He disregarded the rules of international diplomacy, protecting the official who had murdered a British policewoman by firing at her from the Libyan embassy. He abused the notion of a safe conduct pass to remove that official from Britain.

However:

At no stage did international judges issue a warrant for his arrest. Neither the Yvonne Fletcher murder, nor the revelation that Gaddafi had armed the IRA, nor even the Lockerbie atrocity prompted an arraignment. Now, though, the International Criminal Court has indicted the deranged colonel, not for his many violations of national sovereignty and diplomatic conventions, not for his global depredations, but for internal repression. His attacks on Libyan civilians, they say, constitute murder.

If so, then he should be tried in Libya. It is curious enough to see judges at The Hague presuming to overturn the legal system of an independent nation. But to see them doing so while ignoring the violations which actually fall under the normal definition of international law is alarming.

Hannan concludes:

You might feel that I am nitpicking. Gaddafi is plainly a very bad man, so does it much matter how he is brought to justice? Isn’t it more important that he get his deserts morally than legally?

No, it isn’t. The objection to Gaddafi is precisely that he is a tyrant, that he rules arbitrarily, that Libyan courts are instruments of his regime. When we engage in political prosecutions of this kind, we drag ourselves down to his level. For this is, by any definition, a political prosecution. What has changed in the past couple of months is not that Gaddafi became nastier, but that the international community, frustrated by its ability to remove him, decided to “send a message”. We should hold ourselves to a higher standard.

Quite.

I commented as follows:

As you say, Gaddafi is a nasty tyrant, but this is a cynical and hypocritical indictment.

I have some sympathy with those who want to see justice done all across the world. I don't believe that morality is relative. I don't believe, for example, that slavery is acceptable if confined to a land-locked country, rather than perpetrated across the oceans.

But in practice there are limits to our ability to enforce justice across the world, and the arbitrariness of our attempts carries its own injustice.

A typical BBC response

BBC Breakfast this morning related a story:

Some time after 10pm, a couple were out for a meal. At a nearby table, a baby was crying. The man complained, and in response the baby's father broke a wine bottle over his head.

Now, there are lots of details missing, but that's the story as reported. What do you suppose should be society's response?

I would suggest vigorous enforcement of existing laws against violent behaviour. The father here, if we take the facts as reported, has no place in civilised society. When ordinary decent people are afraid to admonish their fellow citizens, for fear of violent response, society suffers. Such crimes should be taken extremely seriously.

The BBC did not take that line. Instead, they asked whether children should be banned from restaurants and pubs.

The mind boggles.

How many murders before life means life?

BBC News reports:

A killer who beat an 89-year-old woman to death, 25 years after being jailed for life for another murder, has been told he will never leave prison.

Odd job man George Norman Johnson, 47, killed Florence May Habesch as she made him a cup of tea in Rhyl, Denbighshire.
...
The court heard Johnson and another man launched a "sustained and savage attack" with knives and a pair of scissors in 1986, killing a man in his own home for £3.

In October 1986 he admitted murder, and was jailed for life with a direction that he should serve at least 17 years.

He was released on 20 March, 2006, on the condition he took regular drugs and alcohol tests.

He was recalled in January 2007 after a positive test, but was released in December 2007.

By October 2010, he had admitted that he was taking drugs, and later admitted he was taking heroin daily and owed money to local drug dealers.

The BBC article doesn't say what crimes Johnson was convicted of before his first murder in 1986, but it's clear that he should never have been released. I find it absurd that he was "jailed for life with a direction that he should serve at least 17 years". Life should mean life. If it had, the life of Mrs Habesch would have been saved.

I'm sure some readers of this story will take it as evidence for the evils of drugs, but in my experience drugs don't turn good men bad. At worst, they remove the already-low inhibitions of already-disturbed individuals. In any case, the answer is to hold people fully to account for their actions. If you choose to get high, you must accept responsibility for the things you do in that state.

Instead, our perverted 'justice' system will continue to let a dangerous minority roam free to rob, rape, and kill, while needlessly criminalising the actions of countless decent people who use prohibited substances for self-medication or harmless recreation.

Big Brother resumes watch in Oxfordshire

On Friday, The Register reported

Oxfordshire police have turned speed cameras back on as others throughout England switch theirs off, prompting questions as to whether senior police and county council figures are playing politics.

Last August, following the withdrawal of central government funds, Oxfordshire made motoring history by being the first county to switch off its speed cameras. This move is reported to have saved some £600,000 per year.

What was the effect of this switch-off, and why were the police so keen to have the cameras back on?

Figures released today by Oxfordshire Police show that for the seven months from August 2010 to January 2011, the total number of casualties across all of Oxfordshire rose from 1171 to 1179: that’s an increase of eight, or just under 0.7 per cent.

At camera sites themselves, the total number of collisions rose from 60 to 62, with injuries increasing from 68 to 83. Sadly for Oxfordshire’s Speed Supremo, Superintendent Rob Povey, in the press this morning with the assertion that we "know" that speed kills, the entirety of this increase of 15 casualties came from non-serious injuries.

Nationwide figures apparently lend some credence to the claims by police, with a study by Professor Richard Allsopp (pdf) suggesting cameras prevent 800 fatalities or serious injuries each year (KSI):

Professor Allsopp, as most experts in this field, does not disaggregate fatalities, since although the general view is that speed increases total KSIs, the question of whether a particular accident will result in a death is far more complex and related to many factors other than speed.

It may well be that speed cameras in Oxfordshire helped reduce incidents, but the figures provided by Oxfordshire Police – without any analysis by those previously employed as experts – are not, by themselves, enough to draw any serious conclusion. The fact that a senior police officer should claim they [do] tells us more about a lack of Police respect for statistical evidence than anything about what is actually happening.

Run the figures backward, and the actual casualty figures for 2010/11 are very much in line with a long-term trend decline running back to 2001, with blip years in different categories across the period. So, 2004/5 reported overall casualties well below trend, while fatalities in 2006/7 were massively up on the previous year.

The article concludes

But then, it seems likely that this debate was never all that much to do with the evidence. As the BBC reported in November last year, plans to turn the cameras back on were already "under way" then. At that point, it is possible that the police were working, at most, on just two months worth of evidence.

For many police officers, or at least Superintendents, I suspect the real issue is not saving lives, or even making money, but enforcing compliance. They couldn't bear the thought of us exercising judgement, and choosing a speed appropriate speed for the conditions. We are to obey the law, no matter how rigid or unreasonable.

A fit of sanity

BBC News reports

The government has rejected lowering the legal drink-drive limit by nearly half, as recommended in a Whitehall-commissioned report.

Last year, Sir Peter North said the limit should be reduced from 80mg of alcohol per 100ml of blood to 50mg.

It seems that Transport Secretary Philip Hammond is the Coalition minister who experienced the unexpected fit of sanity:

Mr Hammond said the number of drink-driving deaths had fallen by more than 75% since 1979.

"But drink-driving still kills hundreds of people so we need to take tough action against the small minority of drivers who flagrantly ignore the limit," he said.

"Their behaviour is entrenched and after careful consideration we have concluded that improving enforcement is likely to have more impact on these dangerous people than lowering the limit.

"We are therefore taking forward a package of measures which will streamline enforcement, helping the police to target these most dangerous offenders and protect law-abiding road users."

Okay, so you might wonder whether we really need "a package of measures" to "streamline enforcement". You might think there are better things for the police to be doing with their time and our money. But at least Hammond recognised that the problem is a "small minority of drivers who flagrantly ignore the limit" and resisted the call to criminalise thousands more people who perfectly safely enjoy a drink or two at a country pub.

Plus ça change

BBC News reports,

US President Barack Obama is lifting the two-year freeze on new military trials for detainees at the Guantanamo Bay prison.

Mr Obama also announced a new process for continuing to hold those detainees not charged or convicted but deemed too dangerous to free.

He said the measures would "broaden our ability to bring terrorists to justice".

Mr Obama had pledged in January 2009 to close the prison within a year.

Whatever you think of Guantanamo, there's nothing like a good hopey-changey U-turn.

A supreme court?

The latest "human rights" violation to be declared in the UK concerns sex offenders.

Personally, I don't like the idea of a sex offenders register. Any offender who poses a danger to the public should not be released. If that means they spend their entire life in prison, so be it.

This time the ruling came from the British Supreme Court, but the law they appealed to was not our own:

Five supreme court justices upheld a decision by the Court of Appeal that the lack of a review was incompatible with the European Convention on Human Rights, the strongest judgement they can give against a piece of legislation.

This is the same convention to which John Hirst appealed for the right to vote. At the time, the Supreme Court did not exist, so after being rejected by the High Court in April 2001, Hirst took his case to the European Court of Human Rights in March 2004. Had the case been brought today, it seems likely that our Supreme Court would also have saved Hirst a trip to Strasbourg, and provided the same ruling with a veneer of domestic respectability.

According to the Supreme Court's website,

The Supreme Court is the highest court of appeal in the United Kingdom. However, The Court must give effect to directly applicable European Union law, and interpret domestic law so far as possible consistently with European Union law. It must also give effect to the rights contained in the European Convention on Human Rights.

Under the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (article 267), The Court must refer to the European Court of Justice (ECJ) in Luxembourg any question of European Union law, where the answer is not clear and is necessary for it to give judgment.

In giving effect to rights contained in the European Convention on Human Rights, The Court must take account of any decision of the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. No national court should “without strong reason dilute or weaken the effect of the Strasbourg case law” (Lord Bingham of Cornhill in R (Ullah) v Special Adjudicator [2004] UKHL 26).

An individual contending that his Convention rights have not been respected by a decision of a United Kingdom court (including The Supreme Court) against which he has no domestic recourse may bring a claim against the United Kingdom before the European Court of Human Rights.

Not such a supreme court after all.

Police.UK Crime Map

The BBC reports

New online crime maps for England and Wales have been launched, allowing users to see which offences have been reported in their local streets.

The site is called police.uk. Here's Oxford:


We actually got a taste of this a while back, when the BBC featured Oxford in its documentary The Truth About Crime.

Now, I'm not sure I trust the BBC to tell me the truth about anything, and I have my doubts about the police, but this sort of transparency strikes me as a good thing. It'll be interesting to see how people react.

No laughing matter

A recent article on The Register drew my attention to a bizarre and concerning incident in France:

Glamourous MEP Rachida Dati complained to the police after an unnamed 40-year-old wrote to her asking for an "inflation", the Telegraph reports.

The request was a reference to a recent, widely-reported Freudian slip by Dati, who confused the French words for inflation and fellatio in a radio interview.

Talking about overseas investment funds she said: "I see some of them looking for returns of 20 or 25 per cent, at a time when fellatio is almost non-existent."

In response to his rather clever joke,

Lyon's Judicial Police raided [the man's] home and arrested him. Following 48 hours in custody, he faces a prison sentence of up to a month and a fine of up to €10,000 on charges of "displaying contempt towards a public servant".

Eh bien, les Français sont fous. It does makes you wonder what sort of treatment we can expect as the EU assumes greater policing powers, but the truth is that our own police, politicians, and courts have already lost their sense of humour.

Trainee accountant Paul Chambers lost his job, and faces thousands of pounds worth of fines, for an off-the-cuff remark on Twitter. Following closures due to snow, he declared:

"Robin Hood Airport is closed. You've got a week... otherwise I'm blowing the airport sky high!"
...
[Defence counsel Stephen Ferguson] said the prosecution had failed to prove his client had any intention to threaten anyone or that he thought there was any risk someone would interpret the tweet in this way.

Quite.

The latest victim of Twitter trouble is Gareth Compton, who tweeted

Can someone please stone Yasmin Alibhai-Brown to death? I shan't tell Amnesty if you don't. It would be a blessing, really.

In bad taste, perhaps, but could anyone seriously interpret this as anything other than a joke? It's a far cry from "Behead those who insult Islam".

Sean Gabb's article on the subject is well worth reading. Recalling his youth, he writes

there was never any question that jokes in poor taste might be illegal. I remember reading an article once in The Spectator where Auberon Waugh called on a television producer to be put up against a wall and shot. Some people laughed. Others scowled. There was never any question that the police might be involved.

England is now a country where virtually any words uttered in public can be treated as a criminal offence. Without thinking very hard, I can remember how Nick Griffin of the British National Party stood trial for having called Islam “a wicked vicious faith”. I can remember how a drunken student was arrested and fined for telling a policeman that his horse looked “gay”. I can remember how a man was arrested and charged and fined for standing beside the Cenotaph and reading out the names of the British war dead in Iraq. I remember a case from this year where a pacifist unfurled a banner outside an army cadet training base. “Stop training murderers”, it said. His home was promptly raided by police with dogs, while a helicopter hovered overhead. He was arrested and cautioned.

After noting the many laws that should be repealed, Gabb makes an important point about those who enforce the law:

Even if police powers could be rolled back to where they were in about 1960, these traditional powers would still be used oppressively. Power is restrained in part by law. Beyond that, it is restrained by common sense and common decency. These are qualities now absent from the police in England, and no changes in law or exhortations from the top can bring them back. Anyone who wants all the policing our taxes buy needs his head examined.

There is no doubt that all those High Tory critics of Robert Peel were right about the dangers of setting up a state police force. It took over a hundred and fifty years to show how right they were. But, when someone is arrested for making jokes about Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, we can see that the line has been crossed that separates a state with police from a police state.

No doubt there are still many good police officers, but I'm sure Gabb is right that there are also many bad ones, and that police culture has shifted. Long gone is 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 upon every citizen in the interests of community welfare and existence

Les prisonniers voteront!

Prime Minister David Cameron was said to have reluctantly accepted that there was no way of maintaining the 140-year-old ban on sentenced prisoners voting in general elections, according to BBC political correspondent Reeta Chakrabarti.

However, he will resist allowing the vote to those prisoners who have committed the most serious offences, our correspondent adds.

Prisoners on remand awaiting trial, fine defaulters and people jailed for contempt of court are already permitted to vote but more than 70,000 prisoners currently serving sentences in UK jails are prevented.

Prisoners were originally denied the right to vote while serving a sentence under the 1870 Forfeiture Act and the ban was retained in the Representation of the People Act of 1983.

Following a legal challenge brought by John Hirst, who was convicted of manslaughter, a final European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) ruling in 2005 said the blanket ban was discriminatory and breached the European Convention on Human Rights.

Whatever the merits of allowing prisoners to vote, this latest submission to the will of the European Court of Human Rights should leave people in no doubt that our sovereignty is endangered by the EU project.

The BBC vs democratic policing

Daniel Hannan has a great article today about the BBC's bias against elected sheriffs, as evidenced in a Radio 4 PM programme, which suggests democratic accountability would somehow transform our green and pleasant land into a Deep South dustbowl, complete with Confederate flags, rampaging rednecks, and Boss Hogg.

The segment starts about 18 minutes and 18 seconds in:

Are you interested in voting for the people who run your local police force? It's one of the government's 'big ideas' for England and Wales. The first elections could be in 2012. It would be an innovation here, but in the United States it's common practice. Reporting for PM from Alabama, and there's more on the blog, Micheal Buchanan ...

Here's a taste of Buchanan's reporting (to replicate his condescension, read it with a cultured Scottish accent):

I went for a spin through rural Alabama with Jimmy Ray Swindle ... Were he to win in November, Sheriff Swindle [a former radio DJ] would not be the only the only law enforcement novice in Alabama. Also standing for sheriff's office across the state this year are a swimming pool installer, a pharmacist, and a church minister. The bar to running for sheriff is pretty low in Alabama ...

Drive around Alabama, and the freeway signs act as an aide memoire to America's civil rights past, Selma, Birmingham, Montgomery flash past, cities where the elected police chiefs played their part in enforcing the will of the majority.

Hannan was right to describe this as "a snotty, sneering, superior piece":

You get the idea. Allow people to choose who directs their local police force and you are likely to get racists, half-wits or crooks – often with hilarious redneck names. Just in case we missed the message, the correspondent spelt it out with his closing words: “While popular elections may increase direct accountability, it [sic] doesn’t necessarily lead to better policing”.

Better for whom? Who is better placed to decide on a local police force’s priorities than a local voter? Some areas might opt for men like Arpaio, though the sheriffs in, say, Vermont, are a very different breed. That’s the beauty of the system: law enforcement reflects the local temper.

Not that the BBC is alone. The unelected beneficiaries of the existing system have also been mounting a fierce campaign against democratic policing. Their favourite argument is that, if you have elections, the BNP might win. Well, yes, they might. But, as a rule, they don’t: the far-Left BNP controls just 0.3 per cent of council seats and 0 per cent of Westminster seats. Still, if the logic of ACPO the Police Authorities and the BBC is sound, why not do away with elections altogether? I mean, how can people be trusted not to pick the wrong candidates?

How indeed? Far better to trust in the Philosopher Kings.

A £250k new identity for Jon Venables?

The Telegraph reports:

Venables could be out of prison in a year despite admitting downloading and distributing violent pornographic images of children as young as two — the same age as James when he was murdered in 1993.

Venables’s current alias is now so widely known that the Ministry of Justice accepts that it is “inevitable” he will have to be given a second new identity at public expense.

The cost of providing him with a new birth certificate, national insurance number and other identity documents is put at £250,000, with close supervision from probation officers on his release costing another £1 million per year.

Even for our hopelessly inefficient justice system, these figures seem implausible, but whatever the costs, it is sick that there is such determination to see this killer roaming free. He has no right to a second chance, much less a third. He should die in jail.

Prison for life

Yesterday I wrote about the virtues of solitary confinement:

Do we really want criminals mingling with other criminals, in whose company they will enjoy an alternative and debased normality? Far better to have them feel that they have been cut off from human society, and then conditionally welcomed back (there are some who should be cut off forever, either on account of the seriousness of their initial offence, or persistent reoffending).

Here's an example of the sort of criminals I think should never be released:

Three boys have been detained for kicking to death a Big Issue seller in a "chillingly casual" attack.

The body of Ralph Millward, 41, was found in bushes in Bournemouth last year. A supermarket trolley had been dumped on top of him....

Jimmy Ayres, 15, Craig Real, 17, and Warren Crago, 17, were convicted of manslaughter last month.

Now, I got into a fair bit of trouble as a teenager, but unprovoked violence against a stranger would never have occurred to me. Society needs to send a strong message against this kind of behaviour. These 'boys' were more than old enough to appreciate right from wrong.

Judge Guy Boney described the attack as a "mindless and chillingly casual" act of violence.

He added it was an utterly merciless killing and a wicked act.
...
Det Insp Jez Noyce, of Dorset Police, said: "The senseless acts of a small group of boys led to the death of Ralph Millward... boys who had no thoughts of the consequences of their actions.

"It would be a sad indictment of society should this mindset be allowed to flourish unchecked.

"This conviction and sentence should serve as a warning to those who feel they can go through life abdicating responsibility for their actions and not then face the consequences."

I agree. So what terrible sentence did these thugs face?

Ayres was detained for 90 weeks, Real for four years nine months and Crago must serve four years.

Sickening. If Transportation were still an option, it would be the ideal choice. These three should be cut off from British society for life. That would be a punishment fitting their crime, and it would send the right message to others who would consider the same sport.

Do prisons work?

Daniel Hannan writes:

Prison, any Lower Sixth debater will tell you, serves three functions: retribution, deterrence and reformation. In truth, it fails at all three: 40 per cent of offenders are reconvicted.
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It is surely worth exploring more effective alternatives. A police superintendent in my constituency, for whom I have enormous respect, thinks that the key is to stop pretending that punishment and rehabilitation can be combined. He wants to give criminals a short stretch of hard labour, complete with bawling drill sergeants, the sole purpose of which would be to make the convict think: “I never want to come back here again”. Once the explicitly penal part of the sentence had been completed, the emphasis would be on imparting skills and equipping the prisoner for gainful employment, a process that would not require 24-hour incarceration except where justified on grounds of crime-prevention.

I have to say this makes a lot of sense to me, although solitary confinement also appeals. Do we really want criminals mingling with other criminals, in whose company they will enjoy an alternative and debased normality? Far better to have them feel that they have been cut off from human society, and then conditionally welcomed back (there are some who should be cut off forever, either on account of the seriousness of their initial offence, or persistent reoffending).

There are many possible systems; what is clear is that the current one isn't working.

Characteristically, Hannan recommends localism:

Let sheriffs set local sentencing guidelines, and let convicts serve their time as “guests” of the local sheriff. Once you forge a direct link between local tax rates and sentencing policy, you create downward pressure on costs.

There might be asymmetries in consequence: an intrinsic quality of localism. The Sheriff of Kent might decide that shoplifters should serve custodial sentences, while the Sheriff of Surrey favoured alternative penalties. One of two things would then happen. Either Kentish crooks (and crooks of Kent) would flood across the county border in such numbers that the people of Surrey elected a tougher sheriff. Or the people of Kent would get sick of funding the requisite number of prison places. At which point, their sheriff might decide on more imaginative solutions. He might, for example, decree that shoplifters should stand outside Bluewater with a placard saying “Shoplifter”. I don’t know what people would choose: that’s the essence of localism. But I do know one thing: best practice would quickly spread, as people found cheapest and most effective ways to cut crime.

When should life mean life?

From the BBC:

Mr Justice Keith, sitting in London, gave Hardy a whole life order, meaning he will die in jail.
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"This is one of those exceptionally rare cases in which life should mean life."

Oh dear.