Week 9: Going to prison and going straight

"The mood and temper of the public in regard to the treatment of crime and criminals is one of the most unfailing tests of the civilization of any country." - Winston Churchill

We know what the prison system is supposed to do. Prison is a more severe punishment than a community sentence or a fine; a prison sentence is how you punish a relatively serious crime. Sentencing is supposed to punish criminals (retribution and denunciation) and reduce crime (deterrence, incapacitation, rehabilitation, restoration). Locking criminals up works as a form of

• retribution: you're punished by being locked up, and the length of the sentence sends you the message of how much society thinks you need to be punished
• denunciation: you're humilitated by being removed from society and put in prison clothes; again, the length of the sentence tells you how much denunciation you're getting
• incapacitation: you're locked up to keep the rest of us safe
• rehabilitation: you're locked up until you've become a reformed character
• deterrence: we lock you up to scare other criminals, or else to scare you into not re-offending when you're released

The fact that imprisonment can, in theory, serve so many different purposes is a worry. If the appropriate level of retribution for your crime is twelve months, but at the end of that time the authorities think you're too dangerous to release, what happens to the retributive 'message'? If you're detained for another year, does that mean that your crime has suddenly become worse than the offence committed by another prisoner who got an eighteen-month sentence? Deterrent sentencing - "making an example" of somebody, "sending a message" to other offenders - makes things even more complicated. (Remember the Facebook Two?)

So sentencing doesn't work perfectly (shock news!) and there's a definite potential for some people to be treated worse than they perhaps deserve. Which people in particular?

One way of looking at crime and criminal justice is to ask what they tell us about society more generally. Crime surveys enable us to identify who suffers the most from crime - and it turns out that in many cases the people hit worst by crime are already having a pretty hard time of it. (People living on run-down and disordered estates are more vulnerable than average to burglary; members of ethnic minorities are vulnerable to racist crime, as well as being statistically more likely to live in high-crime areas; and so on.) In a divided and unjust society (it can be argued), crime makes the effects of division and injustice even worse.

But what about the criminal justice system? Does the prison population - which probably represents the people who are most severely affected by the system - have any particular characteristics, or is it a representative cross-section of society? The answer is quite definitely (a). Celebrity criminals like the ex-MP Chris Huhne make the news when they go to prison, but the great majority of prison inmates are as far removed from them as you could imagine. Prisoners are far more likely than the general population to be unmarried, unqualified, illiterate, out of work or homeless, or to have drug, alcohol or mental health problems. In a divided and unjust society, the prison population is right at the bottom of the heap.

Which is why the treatment of people in prison - and after they leave prison - is so important. Do you focus on their needs and 'deficits' (the skills and abilities they lack), or on their actual and potential strengths? Do you tell them to dwell remorsefully on their past or look ahead hopefully? Do you tell them they're a menace to the public or an asset to the community? What message is most likely to help an ex-offender go straight, bearing in mind that ex-offenders mostly start out with severe disadvantages (a criminal record not least)?

Homework: read the Maruna paper (on Moodle) and have a think about it.

Week 8: The courts and sentencing

This post is in two parts: a quick run-down of the key points of the lecture and some guidance on the essay. First, some thoughts on the courts and sentencing.

The courts

Crown Courts are the ones with judges and juries. About one in eight of all criminal offences are serious enough to be dealt with in the Crown Court. 72% of Crown Court cases are resolved by the defendant choosing to plead Guilty.

Magistrates' courts are presided over by a magistrate rather than a judge. Magistrates are members of the public who have had relatively brief and un-rigorous training; the main qualification for being a magistrate is being able to give up 26 days a year to the role. 82% of magistrates' court cases are resolved with a Guilty plea.

Why so many Guilty pleas?

We don't know what proportion of the people charged by the police are in fact guilty, but presumably it's a fairly high proportion. All the same, you would think that quite a lot of the people who are guilty (and everyone who isn't) would want to take their chances in court. In practice, only about one in five suspects do. The truth is, if you're guilty and the evidence is against you, it makes sense to plead Guilty: you'll get off much lighter that way. And if you're not guilty, but the evidence is or appears to be against you - or you think the court is likely to be against you - it may make sense to plead Guilty for the same reason. The police, the judge and your own defence lawyer will all make sure you're aware of the advantages of pleading Guilty, and may positively encourage you to do so.

What's the purpose of sentencing?

Sentencing has two sets of purposes, which in practice judges and magistrates can pick and choose from:

Retributive purposes, which focus on the crime and use punishment as an end in itself:
Retribution: making the punishment fit the crime
Denunciation: making sure the offender knows he/she is being punished

Utilitarian purposes, which focus on the end result and use punishment as a means to an end:
Deterrence: using punishment to scare potential offenders
Incapacitation: using punishment to make society safer, e.g. through imprisonment
Rehabilitation: using punishment to reduce the number of offenders by reforming them
Reparation: using punishment to help victims of crime

The retributive purposes seems harsher - more vindictive - than the utilitarian ones, but in practice the reverse may be true. It may be easier to justify harsh sentences on deterrent grounds - 'making an example' of one offender as a lesson to the others - than as retribution.

Essay guidance

Firstly, in the immortal words of Douglas Adams, Don't Panic!. All you need to worry about at this stage of your studies is staying on the course, and all you need to do in order to do that is write an essay that's good enough to get a Pass mark. (I hope and trust that your essays will be a lot better than that, but that's the only target you absolutely have to beat.)

Secondly, some guidance on quoting. You should be quoting published sources to support your argument. Do use quotes from books, academic journal articles etc. Don't quote me (lectures or this blog). Don't quote Wikipedia. I believe there are disreputable Web sites out there which provide pre-written essays; it would be a very, very bad idea to use them. (If you do, I guarantee that it will be spotted; at best, the parts of the essay which you have borrowed will be ignored when it comes to marking. Don't risk it.)

Thirdly, some positive recommendations. A good essay will have:

an introduction and a conclusion (but do keep them short)

a definite point of view (but don't say “I think”/"it seems to me" etc; the entire essay is what you think, so it’s a waste of words)

an argument: you should be able to explain the essay to somebody else in a couple of sentences, without using the phrase “and then there’s a bit about...”

Fourthly, how to get started. Here's what I'd suggest. Study the question, do some reading to make sure you understand what it's asking, then (very important) work out what you think about it. Once you've started to plan out an answer, see if there are any gaps in the reading you've done. When you know your argument, you've got a plan and you're confident you can back it up with quotes, put all your notes on one side, open a new document (or take a blank sheet of paper if you want to be old skool) and just write. That blank-sheet moment is the hardest part of the whole process; once you're through that it should be easier, particularly if you're well prepared. Good luck!

Week 7: The police and policing

"We are accountable, I suppose, essentially to ourselves as a responsible body."
- James Anderton, Chief Constable of Greater Manchester (May 1987)

"Accountable: liable to be called to account or to answer for responsibilities and conduct; required or expected to justify one's actions, decisions, etc.; answerable, responsible"
- Oxford English Dictionary

In this week's lecture we looked at the work of the police. What are the police responsible for? How important is crime in defining the police's various responsibilities (crime prevention, crime reduction, crime investigation)? We looked at some figures on how the police actually spend their time, and considered a different way of looking at police work: perhaps (as Egon Bittner argued) the key factor which makes something a job for the police isn't crime, but the use of force. In other words, perhaps the kind of problem which the police deal with is the kind of problem that may need to be solved using force. The reason why the police attend football matches, for instance, isn't that crimes may be committed but that physical force may be needed to calm things down - or, at least, the threat of physical force may be needed to stop things getting too lively.

This definition still leaves a very wide field of activity: the police could spend their time dealing with anything from domestic violence to terrorism, from Saturday night disorder to organised crime, from anti-social behaviour to drug smuggling. If we start asking who decides what they actually do - and who judges how well they do it - we're asking about police accountability.

Borrowing from the dictionary definition above: to say that a person or an institution is accountable is to say that they're required to justify their actions and decisions. These are two very different things. If you're required to justify your decisions, that means that you have to explain what you've chosen to focus on - and the person asking you to explain can tell you that you've focused on the wrong things. (You may have thought that shoplifting and truancy were the two key problems facing your area, but you were wrong.) If you're required to justify your actions, on the other hand, that means that you have to explain what you've done - and at the end of it you can be told that you've done the wrong thing or you haven't done enough. (You may have thought that an extra CCTV camera would turn the shoplifting situation around, but it hasn't.)

(Before reading any further, cast your eye up the page and re-read that quotation from James Anderton. If the police in general took this approach, would they be accountable?)

Accountability can be tough, and imposing accountability on powerful people (like senior police officers) can be a very good way of keeping them on the straight and narrow. But there's a problem: who sets the standards that are used to keep the police accountable? And how do we decide who those people are?

The current answer to these two questions takes the form of Police and Crime Commissioners. Each police force area (outside Greater London) has a Police and Crime Commissioner. The police forces are each accountable to their Police and Crime Commissioner, who can judge whether their decisions are correct and whether their actions are adequate. The Police and Crime Commissioners in turn are accountable to the voters: if we think they're holding the police to account in the wrong way, we can vote them out of office.
 One issue with this kind of two-tier accountability (voters/PCC, PCC/police) is that it's a bit asymmetrical: the PCC has a lot more influence over the police than the voters can possibly have over the PCC. But there's a bigger problem, which is that the ways in which the police need to be held accountable may not be the ways in which the public want them to be held accountable. A particular police force might be doing well at reducing anti-social behaviour but have a massive problem with racism and sexism. In this situation, should the PCC concentrate on holding the police to account on dealing with racism and sexism? What if the public who elected the PCC didn't care about these issues, and wanted the police to concentrate on anti-social behaviour?

Here are some useful links on Police and Crime Commissioners, one year in.

BBC News (2013), "'One in three unaware' of police and crime commissioner", BBC News Web site, 14th November

Jon Collins (2013), "Elected police commissioners still have much to prove", Guardian, 12th November

ITV News (2013), "PCCs do 'three times as much work' as police authority", ITV NewsWeb site, 14th November.

Nick Tarver (2013), "Six fresh policing ideas from past 12 months", BBC News Web site, 14th November

Antony Wells, (2013), "Police and Crime Commissioners a year on", UK Polling Report blog, 14th November

Read (or watch) these Web pages and then think about these questions (you can write down your answers for future reference if you want to).

Who is your Police and Crime Commissioner?

Was your PCC elected as a party candidate or an Independent?

Does your PCC's political affiliation (or lack of one) affect your view of him or her? If so, why?

What do you think a PCC's main priority should be: telling the police what they're doing wrong or telling the police what the public want?

Do you think your PCC is doing a good job?

If you answered the last question No (or Don't Know), what do you think your PCC should do?