29 November 2005 Blog Home : November 2005 : Permalink
We are not deaf to the arguments against custody for juvenile criminals. We know that many young offenders' institutions are no more than training schools for a life of crime. But that is an argument for better detention regimes. It would be all very well to impose non-custodial sentences, if only the alternatives to imprisonment were a real punishment.
The trouble is that most young muggers regard community service orders as a bit of a laugh. They suspect, as we all do, that the desire of the authorities to relieve prison overcrowding is much stronger than their will to punish crime.
The only way to stop the horror of street muggings is to make offenders genuinely frightened of the consequences of their actions. Lord Phillips's new guidelines will make them less afraid than ever.
There would seem to be an obvious solution - introduce a non-custodial sentence that causes major discomfort to the criminal. Something like, say, corporal punishment or being placed in the stocks for a day or two. Of course anything like this will offend too many liberal do-gooders who will worry that we will harm the self-esteem of the poor little darlings or otherwise open them up for psychological trauma, but it seems to me that ten minutes of being beaten is far less traumatic than six months locked up in a prison and far less likely to lead to long term harm because it will not lead to them missing school or their families.This is one thing that middle-class adult smokers who support liberalising drugs don’t understand. As adults it may not be affecting their brain chemistry doing it once a week. They also have jobs to go to. They may control it. But these young kids don’t. When the liberal classes have the view that 'oh, we can all smoke a bit', they do not realise how it generates crime for young people here who need to finance their habit. By not making drugs seem like a big deal, by decriminalising the drug, they are criminalising the kids. This sanctioning of drugs pushes poor kids into bullying at school, then into low-level crime to get the money for drugs. This introduces them to criminality. Most children don’t begin with the desire or the confidence to rob someone. But once they bully for items at school they gradually build up and their targets become more frequent and bigger until they rob adults.
I think there is a key point here. By decriminalizing as opposed to legalizing drugs we get the worst of both worlds. We still pay the high prices for drugs and criminalize the suppliers and hence make it more likely that addicts in turn will also become criminals to pay for their habit, but yet because we do not punish posession we lose all the benefits of regulation that come from a legal supply. If we legalize posession of drugs but tax them and (as with tobacco and alcohol) set a minimum age to sell it we immediately gain the benefit of cutting out an entire criminal funding scheme and we also get to control its distribution by means of licensing thus helping to reduce distribution to minors. Now of course this isn't the only problem, Shaun's article lists a whole bunch, but they all stem from the same do-gooder mindset that treats the poor as victims and fails to realise that the poor are just as capable of making rational cost/benefit and risk/reward analyses as others when it comes to basic things like whether to get pregnant, mug someone or smoke drugs all the time. Reversing this institutional victimology and freeing its victims from their worthless slavery is going to be hard but it has to be better than letting things continue and is precisely what Sarko is trying to do here in France.