Anger Management

What would you do if you chanced on an apparent intimacy in your local pub?
Nick Cohen
Sunday October 5, 2003
The Observer

'You have arranged to meet your regular partner at a local pub. You have been held up and arrive 15 minutes late. When you get there you find they are sat laughing and talking with a stranger. They do not see you immediately. What could you do to solve this problem?'

As the question is from an ambitious Government programme to cure the wickedness of tens of thousands of offenders with therapy, it's a fair guess that 'knock the bastard's lights out' would not be a good answer.

Other questions are harder to judge. How, for instance, should a villain seeking lenient treatment deal with the superficially innocuous statement: 'Strange smells, for which there is no explanation, come to me for no apparent reason'? The naïve might assume that it doesn't matter how he replies. If, however, he agrees and says, that 'yes, absolutely, strange smells assault my nostrils at the strangest times', he will be marked down as a possible schizophrenic.

In all likelihood, the criminal would have given up long before he met that trap. The exam in which the Home Office placed high hopes consists of 41 pages of closely typed text. It contains hundreds of psychological tests, role-playing games and character assessments. Most criminals couldn't begin to handle them because, contrary to the prevailing conservative wisdom, poverty and crime are bound together. Since the 1980s, crime has risen and fallen with the unemployment rate. A few years ago the Home Office found that two-thirds of its prisoners had been so poorly educated they weren't qualified to fill 95 per cent of vacancies advertised in job centres. Illiterate and innumerate, the sole occupations they were equipped to follow were menial manual labour and thieving.

Harry Fletcher from the probation workers' union, Napo, said that 70 per cent of interviewees were no more able to fill out the questionnaire than read Homer in the original. Yet the Government was oblivious to the ignorance of the criminals it was meant to be punishing and reforming. It appeared to assume that they were as likely to be the readers of broadsheet newspapers as men and women who would have trouble making it past the front page of the Daily Star . How else to explain the Government's invitation to offenders to comment on the statement: 'I make it a point to read the financial section of the newspaper before turning to the sports page or entertainment'?

The use of the psychological techniques to make criminals confront their offending behaviour - why do you want to belt a man who is talking to your girlfriend? - had reduced crime in Canada. After completing the test, British men were meant to be handed over to counsellors in accordance with the Canadian model. The theory behind the behaviour therapy was that men who began by saying that they would smack anyone who even looked at their girls would be expertly guided to the conclusion that this was an 'inappropriate' way to behave. They would learn to control their emotions and, perhaps, realise that it was better to congratulate the stranger on his excellent taste in women than invite him to step outside.

But Britain isn't Canada. It is a country disfigured by fantastical inequality and an education system which abandons the children who need it most. Originally 60,000 offenders were meant to take the test.
As men dropped out and therapists were left twiddling their thumbs, the target was cut to 30,000 and then to 15,000. Maybe the attempt to solve crime by throwing psychologists at it will stagger on for a few years. Maybe it will be dropped. Whatever the outcome, public resources have been blown because of the failure of the bureaucracy to understand the country it is meant to be governing.

Buried in a report from the Office of National Statistics last week was a number which ought to make anyone who believes that more money will automatically improve public services sit up. The statisticians had found that a 9 per cent increase in public spending had delivered a measly 2.5 per cent increase in output.
The state of the criminal justice system exemplifies the chasm between theory and practice. In theory, all should be well. The prosperity brought by the withdrawal of the pound from the European Exchange Rate Mechanism and the roaring bull market of the 1990s pushed crime down by about one third. Meanwhile, the Government appeared to have made matters better by providing a record number of police officers. Tony Blair himself has devoted his attention to crime. He made his name as a politician by attacking the soft Tories from the Right after the murder of James Bulger in 1993. In office his governments have sent 45 Home Office bills to Parliament since 1997 and created 661 new criminal offences. As he showed at the Labour Party conference last week, whining civil libertarians won't stop him creating 661 more if he has to.

This happy combination of circumstances, should have led to a well-staffed and under-worked system being able to deal with crime efficiently and effectively under the benevolent gaze of the Prime Minister. Yet everywhere you look the system is in crisis.

The most common punishment from magistrates is a fine. A study by PKF, a consultancy firm, found that in 2002 offenders owed £455 million in fines, court costs and compensation payments to the victims of crime, of which only £260m was collected. It's an exaggeration to say that the payment of fines is now optional and only basically honest people are dumb enough to comply with court orders, but not an outrageous exaggeration. If you wish to show contempt for the courts, it's easily done.

The probation service, which is meant to punish more serious offenders, is in as big a mess. The costs of a inept privatisation of probation hostels - which saw bills rise by 60 per cent - and a concentration of resources on managers rather than frontline staff have eviscerated the service.
According to the Home Office, 100,000 offenders are at large after breaking the terms of their probation orders. Scarcely anyone is looking for them, and once again if you want to ignore the law's punishments you are pretty much free to do so.

After fines and probation orders comes prison. The result of Tony Blair's introduction of American law-and-order politics to Britain after the Bulger murder is a rise in the prison population from 41,000 in 1993 to 73,000 today. Unlike criminals who receive lesser punishments, prisoners can't avoid the law's sanctions. On the other hand, there are so many behind bars the law can't do much for them apart from keep them locked up.

The prison service is dealing with 10,000 more prisoners than it is meant to hold. It's hopeless to even think of teaching them to read or write or sit the Government's psychological tests. A report to be issued by the Prison Reform Trust this week will show that the number of inmates awaiting trial on remand - that is, people who are innocent because they haven't been found guilty - is at a record level. The next Home Office bill - the 46th by my reckoning - will make miscarriages of justice more likely by allowing hearsay evidence and defendants' previous convictions to be put before juries.

In his speech in Bournemouth last week, Blair was at his shabbiest when he declared: 'But today in Britain in the twenty-first century it is not the innocent being convicted [which is the problem]. It's too many of the guilty going free.'

Not a word of this was true. Guilty people are avoiding fines and probation orders because a shameless government is more interested in eye-catching gestures than running an efficient criminal justice system while the innocent are banged up.