Another Queen’s Speech another criminal justice bill
For one final time before an election in 2010 the government delivered their legislative agenda in the form of the Queen’s Speech and just like every other before it, the text made reference to yet another piece of justice legislation to clamp down on anti-social behaviour. The proposed Crime and Security Bill will widen the ambit of criminality from solely young people to include the parents of recipients of an ASBO, who will have their parenting assessed by a state body. There was also a proposal to criminalise the possession of a mobile phone in prison and an expansion of the DNA database of convicted offenders beyond the realms of an Orwellian nightmare.
The Bill proposed today is unlikely to solve any of the core objectives outlined in today’s speech. People will not be made safer by dragging more young people into prison for defiance of tougher ASBOs, just as they won’t be aided by the criminal justice system playing a role in familial difficulties causing criminality. Of course government should support vulnerable families and yes this would reduce crime but support for families is an issue of welfare and comes a little late when your 15 year old son or daughter is locked in prison for defiance of an ASBO. It seems unlikely that family counseling sessions with Jack Straw himself will do little more than pay lip service to the idea of justice reinvestment and community support to prevent crime.
The proposed new law banning mobile phones in prison will add one further offence to the government’s growing list of 3,700 new criminal offences created since 1997. It will join crimes such as the ban on importing Polish potatoes and illegal entry of the hull of the Titanic on the list of unhelpful offences. While some prisoners are co-coordinating serious crime from their cells the majority are simply trying to contact their families.
It is already a violation of prison service orders to have a mobile phone in prison and it is already an offence to smuggle a mobile phone into a prison. It hardly seems the case that prison officers were dying to stop mobile phone use in prison but just did not have the power. Instead mobile phone use in prison occurs because prisons are staggeringly overcrowded and consequently overstaffed. It is a case of systemic failure not a one-off problem.
Finally, the increased collation of DNA data of those in prison will do nothing but further isolate already isolated individuals from society. The message is clear, former prisoners are not eligible for civil rights available to the rest of us but instead must be further segregated from society.
Of course, as with all proposals, the devil will be in the detail but history has taught us to expect nothing helpful to come from a further piece of criminal justice legislation.
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November 18, 2009
Tags: anti-social behaviour, DNA, mobile phones, Prisons Posted in: Government policy, Inside prisons, Prisons
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One Response
I wonder if it might improve literacy rates among prisoners (and their families) if letter writing became the most common form of communication again.
So why not jam the reception of mobiles in prisons and thereby significantly hinder the co-ordination of serious crimes from prison cells?
Fixed line phones could continue to be available for those few things which cannot be conveyed by letter.
This could help resuscitate the dying art of letter writing while at the same time reducing the value of smuggled mobiles in prisons with all of their attendant problems.
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