This woman clearly embezzled funds from her school and betrayed the trust placed in her. But she is no violent or dangerous crook. She poses no personal threat to anyone. She has been chastised by Judge Christopher Elwen of Southwark Crown Court as “self-satisfied, manipulative, mendacious”, and stripped of professional status for life. Her former pupils trooped to court, lynch-mob style, to give her a suitably vicious roasting in the media.
McCabe appears a broken, sick and destitute woman whose time might usefully be spent trying to repay the £500,000 she was allowed to steal from her school. Instead she is to benefit from another £150,000 of public money languishing in a drug-ridden jail from which she will emerge an even more miserable and useless person. To what end? So that those whose negligence permitted her crime — staff, governors, auditors, civil servants — can avoid blame and so the rest of us can feel a cosy sense of vengeance.
St John Rigby College was a Roman Catholic comprehensive school in Bromley which operated from 1993 to 1997 under the “grant-maintained” system crafted by John Major’s Government and beloved of the present Education Secretary, Charles Clarke. The system was designed to give heads and governors autonomy within a budget fixed by the Education Department in London. McCabe’s £3 million a year was left to her and her governors to disburse.
She was manifestly unfit for such authority. For five years she drew on the school Barclaycard account to buy shoes, clothes, Hilton Hotel dinners and Orient Express trips. She took the school chaplain to Malta for three holidays and gave the chairman of governors, Canon John Watts, a Crystal Palace season ticket and a trip to the Middle East. Nobody appears to have noticed a thing, certainly not the financiers of this racket, Whitehall’s civil servants.
After 1997 when Bromley council rescued the school from this negligence and sent in its own management, wrongdoing was detected in a matter of days. Yet Canon Watts was not accused of negligence. The governors and the church authorities were not challenged. The school’s two accountants wandered away scot-free, doubtless with large fees.
Nor has the incident questioned grant-maintained status. Had this been a council school (as it now is, and prospering), I have not the slightest doubt that Mr Clarke and his Schools Minister, David Miliband, would be proclaiming from the rooftops another instance of rotten local democracy. They would have cited St John Rigby as a good reason for their planned disbanding of local education authorities. Yet when the rottenness is Whitehall’s doing, they are silent. The fault must lie with an individual, in this case McCabe.
She is duly packed off to prison with much jeering and cheering. Only thus can fault be expiated and British justice done. I understand that McCabe would not have been jailed in any other country in Europe. Her crime would have been seen as against her local community. It would have been punished by arrest, conviction and humiliation, and her sentence would have been to repay the community with interest. Prison is not “repayment”. It is a form of psychological corporal punishment.
The adherence of the Home Secretary, David Blunkett, to the retributive theory of justice is demanding ever longer sentences. His jails are bursting with people who pose no threat to society. In five years, he and his predecessor, Jack Straw, have added 13,000 to the prison population. They have broken the Victorian record for jailing women, imprisoning more than 4,000, mostly for drug addiction and debt, crimes that socialists once put down to poverty.
Prison is the only public-sector activity (along with war) to which the Treasury applies no cost-benefit and expects no proof of “value-added”. Any amount of money can be squandered on prisons if it yields a pat from a tabloid. Custodial sentences are absurdly expensive (£25,000- £50,000 a year) and ruinous to the families of those affected. Yet ministers legislate for more of them like referees handing out yellow cards.
On Monday the new Director of Public Prosecutions, Ken Macdonald, was revealed as an opponent of Mr Blunkett’s latest populist Criminal Justice Bill, which increases sentences and expands the jail population. He called the proposals nothing short of “grotesque”. Mr Macdonald clearly shares the view of the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Woolf, that longer fixed tariffs would be inflexible and unjust. They would overcrowd jails and do nothing to reduce repeat offending. As for the Government’s policy of jailing for life dozens of “drug mule” mothers from the West Indies, the DPP implies that Britain’s creation of hundreds of orphans in Caribbean back streets was as useless as it was cruel.
It is hard to find a single person involved in criminal justice who supports the Government’s primitivist approach to prisons. The Lord Chief Justice clearly speaks for most judges in his periodic outbursts against the Home Secretary’s interventionism. He is now joined by Britain’s chief prosecutor. The two most recent heads of the Prison Service have openly questioned whether locking up inmates for long periods with little education or hope of rehabilitation makes society a safer place. The past two prisons inspectors, Sir Stephen Tumim and Sir David Ramsbotham, are on record as agreeing. In Norway, jail accommodation is limited and non-dangerous prisoners go on a waiting list. Britain treats its sick like that, but gives its criminals an instant bed for the night.
Non-custodial sentences are the norm elsewhere in Europe. Fines, probation and community service are as effective as custodial ones in reoffending terms, but are less expensive and disruptive to families, which British courts never consider. Drug treatment referral also offers better value for money, as do new “restorative” — or victim-led — schemes. As for the chief cause of soaring imprisonment, Britain’s archaic drugs laws, ministers know they should be changed but are scared of doing so.
Britain’s fixation with imprisonment is not rational: it is pathological. Last year I attended a Downing Street reception at which Cherie Blair gave an impressive speech castigating Britain’s love of prisons. She was speaking in the presence of Mr Blunkett, the Prisons Minister, Hilary Benn, prison governors, judges, civil servants and others. All nodded their agreement. I assume they, and she, were sincere. Yet they all went out into the night and sent more people to jail.
As recently as 1990, a criminal justice White Paper could talk of imprisonment as “an expensive way of making bad people worse” and require custody only “where strictly necessary”. The Nineties reversed that maxim. According to the criminologist, David Garland, the postwar “penal-welfare” consensus collapsed, together with any concept of curbing crime as a community responsibility (see his admirable The Culture of Control). They were replaced by “the new iron cage” of one-size-fits-all incarceration. The prison population doubled over the decade.
Today the British Government jails far more people per head than do the Turks, the Malaysians, the Germans, the French, the Libyans, even the Burmese. Nor does it care if prison works. Most imprisonable offences involving violence, guns and drugs rose over the past decade, as did reconvictions. Juvenile reconviction is 80 per cent, surely the worst failure rate in any public service. Imagine if 80 per cent of hospital operations had to be done again.
A penal policy that was once local, flexible and mostly sensible is now central, inflexible and stupid. I doubt if Mr Blair really believes that “prison works”, any more than does Mr Blunkett in his less tabloid moments. They are probably ashamed of the penal policies with which they have been saddled but which they lack the guts to reform.
As a result, they have become unthinking saffron-clad acolytes of retribution, parading down Whitehall shaking their little bells and chanting their mantra, “Hari Krishna . . . tough on crime . . . tough on crime”. They are not tough on crime. They are soft on prisons.
