TALK ABOUT a soft target: of all the parade of grotesques who pass through the courts, Craig Sweeney is especially horrifying. To abduct and sexually assault a three-year-old girl, twice, before terrifying her with a 100mph chase with a police car and then throwing her out of a vehicle on to the side of the road to be found by the police later does, as the judge in the case commented, beggar belief.
For a Home Secretary looking for tough headlines, this must have appeared an easy one: Sweeney’s sentence was too lenient and the case should be reconsidered, demanded John Reid publicly. In speaking out so quickly, our new Home Secretary engaged his mouth before his brain, and not for the first time. Never mind for a moment that his intervention may make an appeal against the sentence harder to win, which is the objection made known by Lord Goldsmith, the Attorney-General. Look instead at the fact that Mr Reid is railing against government policy. It is the Government that decided to formalise the introduction of an automatic discount for a guilty plea, which is what has made Sweeney’s sentence sound so potentially low.
Sweeney was given the so-called compulsory life sentence for repeat sex offenders, with a recommended minimum term of 18 years. That minimum was cut by one third to 12 years because of his early guilty plea, in accordance with guidelines set 18 months ago by the Sentencing Guidelines Council and considered by Parliament. Sweeney will then be eligible for parole after half that time, ie, six years, with another year off for time already spent on remand. But he would only be released if he were no longer regarded as a danger to the public, and the judge said that he thought any early release, before the 12-year minimum, unlikely. Sweeney could in theory serve life, although in practice hardly anyone ever does.
The target for Mr Reid’s ire ought to be the opaque sentencing policy for which he is responsible. That, and the failure of the sex offenders register, which was recently shown up for the charade it is in the foreign prisoners debacle.
The automatic reduction for guilty pleas from which Sweeney benefited, which is on a sliding scale, was introduced to encourage a guilty plea as early as possible and therefore speed up the court process. The early release parole scheme from which he might benefit is not really designed to encourage good behaviour in jail — the threat of a later release could do that. It is designed to clear space in prison. This week, the prison population is expected to beat its previous record of 77,800; it was up to 77,642 last week. We have never incarcerated so many people for so long: more jail sentences are handed down, and for longer; for sexual crime they have increased by 15 per cent in the past decade.
Remember, the next time you hear a politician talk about introducing a minimum jail term for people carrying knives, or dangerous dogs, or whatever the panic might be that week, that every time you incarcerate a teenage misfit trying to feel bigger by carrying a knife, you release at the other end of the system a Craig Sweeney or another violent criminal or sex offender. (Murders by knife are no higher now than they have been throughout the past decade, incidentally; the only thing that has increased is our hysteria about them.) The jails are full to bursting and while they remain overcrowded there is little hope of any useful work being done with prisoners within them. Seven in ten inmates reoffend within two years of release.
As a minister, Mr Reid has a number of choices. He can build more prisons — expensive, but it may work; crime has fallen as the jail population has soared. Then the Home Secretary can help and educate prisoners more effectively in order to cut recidivism rates.
He could support mentoring or anti-truancy programmes to intervene early with children likely to offend. These are easy to spot in advance; those skipping or excluded from school and lacking parental supervision. Fighting crime begins in nursery school (no, not with Mr Reid — please).
Or the Home Secretary could redraft our notion of a criminal offence. Decriminalising all drugs (and providing the hard ones free to some on the NHS) would slash crime at a stroke and save money too: 58 per cent of those arrested for theft or robbery test positive for heroin or cocaine. They are stealing to fund their habit. Think too of all the smugglers and the drug-led gang wars we would no longer have to deal with. No politician dares do it, of course.
Then Mr Reid could treat as mentally ill the thousands of prisoners who are mentally ill, Craig Sweeney perhaps among them.
Or, of course, he can win a cheap headline by attacking a judge. No 10 is right behind the Home Secretary’s attack on the judge, John Griffith Williams, QC, even hyping it further by talking up the “disconnect” between the public’s common sense and some judicial decisions. So too is The Sun, conducting a campaign against soft judges.
Suddenly judges deemed too lenient are being “named and shamed” all over the place, to No 10’s delight. The Court of Appeal increased 65 sentences in 2005 for undue leniency; it decreased more than 1,450 others for undue severity. But the Government doesn’t collate information on individual judges who are too harsh, only those who are too soft; it would be too costly, it says.
At a seminar in Downing Street last week, Tony Blair invited think-tanks and academics to debate the need to “rebalance”, as No 10 puts it, the criminal justice system. Among the questions participants were asked to consider in advance was: is it the law that’s wrong or is it “essentially” the way that the law is interpreted? It was pretty clear that No 10 had already made its mind up. Lawyers and judges were not invited.
It is left to Sir Oliver Popplewell to speak for the judiciary. Sir Oliver, a retired judge who once famously asked what Linford Christie’s “lunchbox” was, pops up on the Today programme to draw obscure parallels with ancient cases and sound like the jovial, posh old cove that judges are caricatured as being (with some truth, admittedly). Judges don’t really do media. Even the Attorney-General hurriedly had to get himself a press officer yesterday morning.
But listen to what they are up against. Hark at Margaret Moran, MP and member of the Home Affairs Select Committee, the closest the BBC could get to a government minister, talking about “serial paedophiles” on the Today programme yesterday. “We are talking about child abuse, we are talking about abuse of babies,” she protested. Nothing over-emotive there, then. The Government has seized upon Craig Sweeney as a particularly revolting figleaf for the manifest failings of the Home Office.
Read recent columns by Alice Miles: here
