11.04.1996

Howards’ cage for social decay

The home secretary plans to throw more of us in jail

You can always tell when a general election is looming. The stale ‘law and order’ rhetoric goes on overdrive, as more and yet more punishment is promised. The tabloid and rightwing press starts to salivate, rabidly denouncing the ‘opposition’ for being soft on crime. The Daily Mail churns out robotic articles blaming “the sixties” and “loony feminists” for the breakdown in society. The only thing holding back the forces of anarchy are the good old police force and the judicial system.

Sounds drearily familiar? Yes, Michael Howard has been shouting off his mouth again. This time, though, Howard has really gone to town, in a near frenzied bid to play the ‘law and order’ card and cash in the votes. Such hysteria is understandable, as trying to outflank Tony Blair’s Labour Party from the right these days is quite a job. Remember Jack Straw’s pledge to “wage war” on squeegee-merchants and clampdown on “noisy neighbours”? Not to forget the Labour Party’s sordid and servile support last week for ‘emergency’ legislation directed against so-called terrorism.

Howard’s proposals for tougher sentencing were described as “beyond doubt revolutionary” by Lord Donaldson, former Master of Rolls and senior judge. These “revolutionary” proposals include automatic life sentences for second-time rapists and serious violent offenders, a mandatory minimum seven-year sentence for drug dealers and the abolition of automatic early release and 50% remission for ‘good behaviour’. All in all, an alarmingly authoritarian set of measures are now in the pipeline.

In many ways this would represent the ‘Americanisation’ of the British judicial system, with US-style minimum sentences. Bill Clinton did a Howard last year and, quite arbitrarily, launched a ‘three strikes and you’re out’ policy, which in one case saw a man convicted of stealing a pizza get a life sentence. Howard has gone one better in this respect - with him it is now ‘two strikes and you’re out’.

Like in America this will, of course, see an inexorable growth in the prison population, as Howard cheerfully admitted: “I accept that [the proposals] are likely to lead to an increase in the prison population but I believe we simply cannot afford not to take action.” It is estimated that under these proposals an extra 10,800 offenders will have to be jailed each year.

This is good news for some. Howard wants to build 12 private prisons within the next l5 years in order to house the extra inmates - a trend already under way in the United States, where there is serious money to be made in the ‘law and order’ business. The building programme for such a scheme may cost up to £435 million a year. The total cost could amount to £l.2 billion.

If Howard gets his way, this will mark another shift towards barbarism - which will ultimately affect all of us. While communists do not have a light-hearted or frivolous approach to serious crime - ‘under socialism nobody will commit murder, as we will all be happy’- we recognise that any measures which aim to increase the powers of the state and safeguard the ‘stability’ of bourgeois society offer no solution. The more the capitalist system decays, the more people will turn to narrow individual solutions - such as crime.

Paul Greenaway