In 1990, John Major succeeded Margaret Thatcher, and this is the only time the words ‘John Major’ and ‘succeeded’ have ever been used in the same sentence.
How a man who early in his career failed a maths test for bus conductors went on to become first chancellor and then prime minister isn’t something I can even hope to understand. One thing I can say for sure is that basic intelligence doesn’t seem to be an ironclad qualification for such jobs.
Today Sir John has regaled us with interesting proposals on how to relieve prison overcrowding. What Britain is essentially looking at is a situation New Yorkers call ‘blivet’: ten pounds of sh*t in a five-pound bag.
Our prison population is 88,000 at present, but, since present is followed by future, that number is expected to reach six digits in a few years. Alas, we haven’t enough spaces to accommodate them all, hence the blivet.
If you think that we should build more prisons to tackle this problem, you simply don’t understand the ‘liberal’ mind. People like Major don’t think in straight lines. For them the shortest distance between two points is the cube, and they’ve never heard of Occam’s razor.
“Too many prisoners are sentenced to short-term imprisonment,” writes Sir John, and this is the only statement in his article that makes me nod vigorously. Yes, our judges routinely mete out derisory sentences for the kind of crimes that used to make malefactors dance the Tyburn jig when England was still a world power.
Come to think of it, bringing back hanging would go a long way towards relieving prison overcrowding, but such an outlandish idea has never crossed Sir John’s mind (I use this word in a manner of speaking). Instead he tugs at our heart’s strings:
“Prison means the loss of liberty, but for the prisoner it often means much more besides. Very often it means the loss of their job, their home and their relationships.”
(Note the woke syntax: ‘their’ instead of ‘his’. Such verbal monstrosities can easily be avoided even if masculine pronouns burn one’s lips. Here, for example, Major could have written “but for the prisoners…,” but he is above such subterfuge.)
Sir John goes on to explain that such deprivations complicate rehabilitation by making it harder for the ex-con to insinuate himself into normal life on the out:
“This does not bode well for when they are released: both common sense and empirical evidence suggests that prisoners who have lost those stabilising influences are more likely to return to crime. That is in no one’s interest – and certainly not the public at large.”
That’s doubtless true, but the chap should have thought about this before nicking that car or burgling that flat. As for recidivism, I quite like the system of ‘three strikes and you’re out’ used in some American states, where a third criminal conviction entails a mandatory life sentence. That strikes me as good deterrence.
Yes, well, you see, according to Sir John, non-violent crimes aren’t really serious enough to warrant imprisonment. So what if a tattooed yahoo broke into your house and stole your possessions? At least your wife stayed unraped, you stayed uncrippled, and both of you stayed alive.
Major begrudgingly admits that “prison works” for violent crimes – but only for them: “Protecting the public from violent crime is a key responsibility of any government and, in such cases, stern sentences must continue to be delivered. But we should beware that excessive zeal to be ‘tough on crime’ does not lead us into unwise policy.
“We are told that ‘prison works’, and, where it holds the worst of criminals in custody, it does. But I do not believe our justice system – or our society – is well served if it also imprisons those who could be better punished by non-custodial sentences.”
Such as community sentencing, driving bans, curfews, passport confiscation, which, explains Sir John, would be cheaper than building more prisons (true) and more conducive to rehabilitation (false).
The problem with Sir John’s views isn’t so much the specifics of each alternative he proposes as the ‘liberal’ mindset behind them.
Our government treats habitual burglars and thieves with avuncular benevolence because they redistribute wealth, which is essentially the same job the government does. Granted, criminals go about that worthy task in a slightly unsavoury way, but they still deserve every benefit of the doubt.
That’s why most burglaries in Britain go uninvestigated or else unprosecuted. Protection of property, one of the few legitimising functions of the state, has fallen by the wayside.
But woe betide any subject of His Majesty who protects his own property by hurting or, God forbid, killing the criminal. Not just the book but the whole library will be thrown at him for failing to realise that the burglar was “merely doing his job”, as ‘liberal’ people have explained to me many times.
When he supplanted Major at 10 Downing Street, Tony ‘Anthony’ Blair promised to be “tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime”. Sounds good, provided Messrs Blair, Major et al. trace the causes of crime to the primary cause: original sin. But they don’t, do they? Thus Major:
“Very often – although I concede not always – low-level criminality is a consequence of mental illness or addiction to drink or drugs. In these cases, if we are serious about stopping reoffending, the better response must surely be treatment rather than imprisonment… Many are vulnerable: addicts, mentally ill, or – in a distressing number of cases – themselves the victims of trauma and abuse.”
No free will or any human agency is involved. Most (although Sir John generously concedes that not all) criminals act without choice, driven that way by mental illness, drug addiction or history of abuse.
It’s true that the kind of families most criminals grow up in make them more likely to be abused when children, and then to take drugs and become mentally ill as a result. Yet they still had a free choice not to take drugs, and denying that betokens a false understanding of humanity.
As for mental illness, the term has lost much of its meaning. It now covers not just clinical madness but also a tendency to bad moods, an innately violent or otherwise criminal nature and a whole raft of other conditions that have no business being medicalised.
Prisons do work for any crimes, not just violent ones – provided we understand what working means in this case. To Sir John and his ilk, the primary role of prisons is therapeutic and educational redemption, aka rehabilitation. But that’s a fallacy: rehabilitation is an aim of incarceration, but only a secondary or rather a tertiary one.
The primary purpose of imprisonment isn’t rehabilitation but punishment. And the purpose of punishment is to make sure justice is done – and seen to be done. The rule of law is impossible without the people knowing that the law protects them, rather than criminals.
When, on the other hand, people realise that their property is at the mercy of any moron intrepid enough to steal it, and the law merely raps him on the wrists, they lose respect for the law, becoming more likely to break it themselves.
Speaking of the causes of crime, a brief look at the demographic break-down of the relevant statistics shows the preponderance of certain ethnic, racial and religious groups, many of whose members are recent arrivals at these shores. It never occurs to the likes of John Major that one way to reduce the prison population is to redress the demographic imbalance by, say, stopping the cross-Channel dinghies.
Letting criminals go free is so much easier and, well, nicer – as the term is understood in Sir John’s circles. But I do have one question: would he be able to pass the bus conductor’s exam should he choose to re-sit it? No, forget that. We don’t have bus conductors any longer.
P.S. Would you like to double your net worth in just one year? Easy.
Just issue your own cryptocurrency and, if you have influence, peddle it through pay-to-dine schemes, earning tens of millions each time for your hospitality. Have your wife do the same, on a smaller scale.
Then use that influence to enable your family members to get multi-billion-dollar property development deals in the Middle East. Ideally, make those countries finance the deals at least partly. Open a series of luxury hotels and trade favours by making foreign, mainly Middle Eastern, dignitaries block-hire whole floors at $300,000 a night.
That’s it, Don’s your uncle, Melania’s your aunt. Oh, sorry, I left one detail out: first you must become the most corrupt president in US history.
The laws of Solon, Justinian and King Inë of Wessex (the best of the three) had no use for imprisonment as a punishment. Not even that notorious leftie Edward Gibbon (in Chapter XLIV, where he discusses all three lawgivers) has any use for it. But in an insane age, when the effective remedies of capital and corporal punishment have foolishly been abolished, it’s inevitable that there will be more and more criminals and therefore more and more prisoners.
By the way, the chief reason why we have no bus conductors is that the bus companies couldn’t protect them from the passengers. A driver of a late-night service can collect fares from behind a protective screen, but a conductor is helpless. An alternative to no bus conductors would have been heavily-armed bus conductors, but that idea didn’t catch on even in the USA, where the idea of heavily-armed householders is constitutionally approved (and rightly so).
As for Sir John Major, I’ve heard that in his youth he worked in a circus, so presumably numeracy isn’t required in order to balance a colourful ball on one’s nose. Alas, alas, alas for Lady Thatcher’s susceptibility to flattery!
The evil of an unpunished crime is always greater than punishing a mentally ill criminal.
At least westerners can console themselves that violent crimes are punished. Or can they?
Recently a Canadian judge (the most pernicious professional in the most full-blown woke country in the world today) ruled in the case of a man who assaulted and crippled another man for life after a minor traffic accident between them. I have abbreviated the case of most of its revolting details and even more revolting judge’s rationale: ‘The perpetrator being of Indigenous origins, was therefore very likely to have had a difficult upbringing, and it would be unjust to sentence him like a non indigenous person (a laughable 21 month prison term in such a case). In short, 12 months house arrest.