American Perspective

It's rapidly becoming clear that one of the real joys of blogging is that people send you stuff and I'm grateful to a reader for pointing me in the direction of what the hard-nosed conservative right are presently advocating over there in the USA. It makes fascinating reading, not least because it completely debunks the arguments being put forward by our own right wing for the greater use of prison. Here is a flavour of what Right on Crime is saying:- 

"Under the incarceration-focused solution, societies were safer to the extent that dangerous people were incapacitated, but when offenders emerged from prison – with no job prospects, unresolved drug and mental health problems, and diminished connections to their families and communities – they were prone to return to crime.

While the growth of incarceration took many dangerous offenders off the streets, research suggested that it reached a point of diminishing returns, as recidivism rates increased and more than one million nonviolent offenders filled the nation’s prisons. In most states, prisons came to absorb more than 85 percent of the corrections budget, leaving limited resources for community supervision alternatives such as probation and parole, which cost less and could have better reduced recidivism among non-violent offenders.

Illustrating the failure of the entire corrections system, two-thirds of individuals now entering prison are offenders whose probation or parole was revoked, and half of these revocations are for technical violations such as not reporting to a probation officer, rather than for new crimes.  Parole and probation reporting are critical elements of community supervision, but it is worth asking whether re-incarceration is a sensible sanction for such violations."

Obviously it would be preferable if these sentiments were being expressed from a moral or philosophical standpoint rather than from pure economic necessity. But it serves as further evidence, if any were required, that the financial crisis has helped concentrate right wing minds on evidence-based practice rather than just political dogma.

Since publishing his Green Paper on crime, sentencing and rehabilitation, Ken Clarke has come in for a real hammering from the right-wing press over here. The Sun is campaigning for him to lose his job and the Telegraph and Daily Mail have each speculated about a rift between the minister and David Cameron. It's reported that Tory back-benchers are fulminating about a 'soft' Justice Secretary and are privately urging the Prime Minister to sack him as part of a New Year cabinet re-shuffle. However, many readers of this blog will be aware that I feel Ken is in fact on the right path and here we have evidence of a similar emerging agenda from the right in the USA of all places.

What now seems inevitable is that the economic situation is dictating that an accommodation has to be reached between the right and more liberal thinkers. Of course here in the UK this has been cemented formally in a coalition government since the Electorate denied any one party an overall majority at the last General Election. It's just possible that both parts of the political spectrum are beginning to learn that they have more in common than they earlier supposed.