Judging from the experience of places that have reduced crime significantly, engaging communities and increasing public investment are two sides of the same coin
A Californian construction worker was recently arrested in northern Pakistan, equipped with night-vision goggles, a pistol, dagger and a 40-inch sword. Apparently he was on a one-man mission to find and decapitate Osama bin Laden. Presumably he thought that he could do a better job than the US government.
This story reminded me of how the Conservatives' Big Society message during the election campaign was mockingly portrayed by the Lib Dems and Labour as creating a ‘DIY Society'. It was widely acknowledged that the Big Society message failed to resonate on doorsteps. What did it mean in practice? What would be the relationship between government and society? Was this just camouflage for retrenchment of the state?
One of the causes of confusion was the contrast between the Big Society message and the Broken Britain narrative. The goal of the Big Society, enabled by government, was to heal Broken Britain and the “whole stew of violence, anti-social behaviour, debt, addiction, family breakdown, educational failure, poverty and despair [affecting millions]" it engendered. But the Big Society message failed to get across how these drastic problems were supposed to be solved by charities, social enterprises and an ‘army' of 5,000 trained community organisers.
Take one of the policy areas most associated with Broken Britain: the criminal justice system. During the election campaign, the Tories cited
10,000 incidents of antisocial behaviour every day in the UK. They worried that four out of five people charged with knife crime avoid prison. So
they pledged to enforce longer sentencing and increase prison capacity: ‘in the last three years, 80,000 criminals have been released early from prison because the government failed to build enough places. We are determined that early release will not be introduced again, so we will redevelop the prison estate and increase capacity as necessary to stop it.' This all sounds like increased government spending and more blunt government action: precisely what the Conservatives attacked Labour for. Where was the role for the Big Society?
The Conservative election message wasn't about increased involvement and spending of the state, it was the complete opposite: “we're living beyond our means.” It was about ‘freeing up people to do good, power to the people, ground up, enabling' and offering greater legal protections for people to apprehend criminals and defend themselves.
But what does this mean in practice? Is the Big Society to play a role in “self-policing communities" which uphold local behavioural norms (discouraging people from harassment, public drinking, etc.)? This raises a number of concerns, including who decides what these ‘norms' are, particularly if acts outside these norms are legal? Does this mean that legal acts can be discouraged or punished because they break ‘norms'? This is tricky territory. Many people in Britain would argue that it is precisely the British attitude of tolerance that marks it out as a good place to live. Tolerance, to an extent, relies on non-judgement and a willingness to allow ‘norms' to be challenged and broken.
Now, there can be “community-based policing”, where (preferably the same) officers walk or cycle a beat, build relationships with people in a neighbourhood, build up a picture of local issues and needs and in some instances gently intervene against legal breaches of accepted behavioural norms before a crime is committed (the kinds of thing Community Support Officers currently do). This approach is to be contrasted with “response policing”, where officers respond to reports of crimes and are rarely linked to a specific neighbourhood. But to achieve the former necessitates action on the part of the state. It requires a huge amount of resources (money and police officers), and honestly, will those resources be found by fulfilling the age-old politician promise of “cutting red tape” and “reducing the back office”?
If the Conservatives are serious about tackling crime then they should look to places like New York City that achieved a remarkable reduction in the number of prisoners and the number of crimes committed since the early 1990s. Michael P. Jacobson, who was the probation and correction commissioner in the Giuliani administration (which oversaw the steep reduction in the crime rate) claims that far more arrests took place under his watch than in the early 1990s, and yet the number of New Yorkers in prison declined. Pre-Giuliani administration, roughly 50% of people arrested for low-level offences would get a desk-appearance ticket ordering them to go to court. That percentage has now fallen to just 10% because even minor-law breakers go through “the system” and spend time – possibly just one night - in jail. This treatment theoretically discourages many first-time offenders who are introduced immediately to the harsh realities of prison, albeit for a short period of time. New York City's jails now hold about 13,500 people, down from roughly 23,000 in 1993. In addition to the crackdown on criminal acts, significant funds were set aside for rehabilitation services and crime prevention. Rikers Island, the notorious prison in New York City, developed a systematic pre-release system linking inmates with a job, treatment and training programmes in the community. David Wilson, former chair of the Commission on English Prisons Today,
concluded that New York City achieved its success by ‘diverting away from prison low-level, nonviolent offenders and investing heavily in a range of treatment to overcome their mental health, addiction, housing or other social problems. It has been done at both an individual and at a community level, and has in particular been driven by the courts.'
The picture that begins to emerge is of a state that spends generously in order to tackle crime, and this does not mean simply building new prisons (the only area in the criminal justice system where the Conservatives have pledged to put extra money). This is also about the state spending money to tackle the causes of crime, through community-based policing, funding rehabilitation services and work and training programmes. It means tackling social conditions such as high unemployment, low educational aspirations and the local environment. There is a central role in this for social enterprises, charities and neighbourhood groups. Vision Housing for example, a social enterprise established by an ex-offender, offers quick-access resettlement housing service for women leaving prison, providing support with crisis loans, housing benefit and signposting to other services to help ex-offenders find work or training and get on with their lives. In the last three years Vision Housing has re-housed over 200 ex-offenders. The rate of recidivism amongst this group is 7%. The national average of recidivism by prisoners on short sentences is 60%. If helping organisations such as Vision Housing reach more people is what the Big Society means that this should be cause for celebration. But as the coalition government prepares to cut, hopes of emulating New York City's falling crime rate and the accompany investment in new ways of tackling crime seem faint. The Lib Dem election promise to employ 3,000 more police officers has been dropped, some police forces have already frozen recruitment and the possibility of cuts to the numbers of officers has not yet been ruled out. Experts predict that
at least 35,000 police posts will be axed.
Offering have-a-go heroes greater legal protections to apprehend criminals and defend themselves is only a token gesture in the grand scheme of things - unless the Conservatives are genuinely paving the way for state retrenchment to be replaced by voluntary groups along the lines of the
Arizona Minutemen who ‘operat[e] within the law to support enforcement of the law'. If the Broken Britain thesis is accurate then it requires a serious solution, and this in turn requires significant funding. Judging from the experience of New York City, it seems that this requires the state to take less of an ‘enabling' role and more of a fully-involved hands-on one. Or perhaps the new Home Secretary's promise of a “radical change” in the way Britain is policed, by allowing citizens to elect individual officials who will influence police forces' strategies and budgets and “kick people out of office if things go wrong,” is the answer?