“TOUGH ON CRIMS, tougher on the parents of crims.” That was not one of the phrases used by Her Majesty yesterday, nor a freshly spun government soundbite. The Queen’s Speech was again full of Bills aimed at tackling crime, yet Tony Blair seems to have become convinced that “tough on the parents” may sum up the most effective means of crime prevention.

There is an intractable problem in our criminal justice system. Crime has fallen over the past ten years, but there remains a small group of persistent offenders responsible for most of the crime. Official figures published last week reveal that, despite a range of initiatives from anger management to cognitive behavioural therapy courses, the numbers of people reoffending has remained stubbornly high, higher in fact than when Labour came to power.

So how about this for a shiny new idea? You simply stop people becoming criminals in the first place. It sounds great, and no, I’m not writing this from my heavily padded home in La-la land. This is now an important plank of government policy.

So, how are they going to try to achieve it? First, by taking stock of a shift in thinking. For many years sociological criminologists have focused on environment, seeing social factors as the key determinants in criminal behaviour. Now there is a new thinking abroad, and it’s pretty startling. Based on research by people such as Professor Terrie Moffitt at the Institute of Psychiatry, it identifies two types of offender. Those known as “life-course persistent offenders” are a small group of males who exhibit antisocial criminal behaviour from early childhood and continue to offend into middle age and later.

The second group is made up of those whose criminality is limited to their adolescent years. The chances of a person falling into the first and more dangerous group appear to be dramatically raised where there is an interaction between genetic and environmental factors.

Yes, I did mention the G-word. For years any discussion of the so-called criminal gene was considered somehow an unacceptable part of the crime-prevention debate, raising the spectre of eugenics and the Nazis. Well, the early findings of the latest research posits the theory that there is in effect an antisocial gene, the one responsible for generating monoamine oxidase, the enzyme that regulates neurotransmitter levels in the brain. The malfunctioning of that gene alone cannot determine “life-course persistent offending”, but the interaction of the gene functioning at low levels together with environmental factors dramatically raises the chances of lifelong offending.

The Government is not advocating large-scale genetic screening, but one of its leading advisers, Stephen Scott, of the Institute of Psychiatry, believes the genetic research is proven by the experience of children from abusive backgrounds who are adopted into well-balanced families. Despite their happy, loving new homes, such children still have a greatly increased chance of becoming criminals. It is not surprising, therefore, that Mr Blair is convinced that it is not only possible to identify some of the reasons why people offend, but also to spot the next generation of criminals and intervene in their lives.

“Identification” and fluffy-sounding “intervention” raise difficult questions. How do you identify future criminals? Are we not in the fictionalised world of films such as Minority Report?

Apparently not. We’re in the very real world of the midwife and the health visitor. The Prime Minister has talked of setting these professionals the task of identifying the kind of problem environment likely to create future criminals. How such a role might affect the relationship of trust between a midwife and a pregnant mum is open to question. And would identification automatically be seen as stigmatisation? I’m not sure how I’d react to a knock at the door telling me that my family had been identified as needing help to avoid producing future criminals.

But I’m not the kind of person in the likely target area. Some fear that the very process of identification could create a kind of new Victorian “criminal class”. Once people are identified, however, “intervention” could then take place in the form of help with addiction, or the new hot idea, parenting classes.

They can undoubtedly work well, but they too come with potential problems. As with many courses already designed to cut offending, people drop out, especially those with complex, deep-seated problems of addiction and abuse. So, to make them effective, do you make them compulsory, perhaps by way of a court order, or cutting benefits? And if attendance is compulsory, might that not amount to a new crime of “giving birth while poor” ? Compulsion is not something that the Government has proposed, but it seems possible.

John Reid’s announcement this week, that parents will have to pay big fines if their children break the new beefed-up ASBOs known as “good behaviour” orders, demonstrates how the Government sees parents as the crucial break on youth crime. The creation of sin-bin areas for problem families, where strict curfews and orders will apply, runs alongside preventative measures such as parenting classes.

The key to cutting reoffending now seems to be the targeting of those who bring criminals up. “Personally, I blame the parents” should be the new government soundbite.

The author is a barrister and presenter of Law In Action on Radio 4

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