17/11/02

Mr Blair's Recipe For More Crime 

Alasdair Palmer

The Sunday Telegraph

'We are setting out to rebuild the system in favour of the victim," the Prime Minister told the House of Commons last week as he unveiled three new bills to reform the criminal justice system. Tony Blair insisted that the idea behind those reforms is to "safeguard the interests of victims, witnesses and communities" by ensuring that more criminals are convicted and punished.

So there are measures to replace juries with judge-only trials in cases where juries might be intimidated; to allow murderers, rapists and other violent criminals to be tried a second time for the same offence; and even to allow judges to inform juries of the defendant's previous convictions.

The new measures may indeed ensure that more criminals are convicted. The problem is what to do with them once they have been found guilty. The most obvious answer is send them to prison. That is not, however, what the Government plans to do. It is determined to increase the use of "community sentences" instead. These are a well-researched disaster.

According to the Home Office's own figures, the reconviction rate for those serving their sentence out of prison hovers around 80 per cent, with hundreds of thousands of new offences being committed while criminals are "punished in the community". Of course, none of those offences could have been committed had the criminals been in prison.

But because the Government's spending priorities are schools'n'hospitals, it won't release more money to build new prisons - so it cannot lock up more criminals. This means that more convicted criminals will be left "in the community", able to continue to burgle, steal and thieve their way through the houses, businesses and shops where the rest of us live and work. That is exactly what most of them do. And it is why crime continues to go up.

The only group that the Government seems genuinely determined to imprison is those accused of sexual offences. Apart from instigating a new, indeterminate sentence for sexual offenders, the new legislation proposes changes to make it easier to convict men of rape. The conviction rate has fallen from 33 per cent 25 years ago to just over 7 per cent in 2000, largely because most rape prosecutions are now of men who knew their victims. In their defence, they claim that sex was consensual. When the only prosecution evidence is the word of the victim saying that it was not, juries are understandably reluctant to convict.

To make it easier for juries to convict men of rape simply on the uncorroborated say-so of the alleged victim, the Government has decided to change the law of consent. Consent will now be unavailable as a defence if a woman says she was under the influence of drink or drugs when sex took place, or if a man had not taken "all reasonable steps" to ensure that she was "freely agreeing".

The change is going to be very similar in effect to one made in the early 1990s, when the then Conservative Government, eager to increase the number of convictions in cases of the sexual abuse of children, abolished the requirement that judges warn juries of the dangers of convicting in cases where there was no corroboration apart from the word of the accuser. The Law Lords also ruled that a defendant could be convicted on the uncorroborated testimony of an individual who claimed that he or she had been sexually abused decades earlier, even though there was no evidence beyond an allegation that might have been constructed two decades after the events it purported to describe.

The result was an avalanche of accusations by former residents of care homes against the men who used to work in them. Scores of former care-home workers were convicted of sexual abuse and sentenced to 10 or more years in prison - most on nothing more than the uncorroborated claims of their accusers. Basil Williams-Rigby is one such man: a former care-home worker, he was convicted two years ago of abusing two boys and is serving a 12-year sentence. The only evidence against him was the uncorroborated claims, made 25 years after the event, of his two "victims". The Select Committee on Home Affairs now believes that more than 100 men like Mr Williams-Rigby have been wrongly convicted. His case goes to the Court of Appeal in December.

The most likely outcome of the Government's determination to convict more men accused of rape is that more innocent people will be sent to prison. The thieves, thugs and brutes who are doing daily damage to people's lives and homes will, however, stay out of it - Labour's attachment to "community sentences" guarantees that.