I have direct experience of three great national institutions that have become broken through carelessness and lack of urgency. Not least the BBC, the world’s best and best-known broadcaster, which clung to a monopolistic licence fee in a digital age and is slowly dying.
Then there’s the NHS, which so recently millions applauded on the streets but which Lord Darzi has officially confirmed is often second-rate and in decline — indeed it has been so chronically underfunded that whatever ministers say about robbing hospitals to find money for prevention is essentially ingenuous. Third, and another institution that helped to cement Britain’s claim to greatness but is now close to collapse: the criminal justice system.
We’ve all woken up to the elephant in the room about prisons and the absurd, almost couldn’t-make-it-up, rationing of sentencing and ad hoc release of inmates. But that’s not the only crisis to have crept up on us. We saw criminal justice at its best in response to the July and August riots, with swift court appearances and palpably deterrent results. But that’s far from the norm. On average it takes almost two years from an offence to completion at crown court, and more than a third of a million cases are in a queue to reach magistrates’ courts. According to the National Audit Office, the ambition to reduce the backlog is “no longer achievable”.
Justice delayed is justice denied. For victims, the slothful process prolongs their travails or becomes divorced from how their lives have moved on. Memories fade, cases atrophy and the shillyshallying squanders any power of deterrence. Despite an assumption that justice “brings closure”, it rarely does.
Public faith in great institutions of state is so great that it tends to linger long after such devotion is misplaced, and perversely we have particular confidence in our justice system for the very reason that it is archaic; but our loyalty means we don’t recognise its faults even when they are glaring.
For example, we like to believe we have open justice but — apart from the theatrical flourish of courtrooms — the process is largely secretive, starting with confidential police inquiries, through mysterious CPS pre-trials and culminating in behind-closed-doors jury deliberations, delivered without justification or insight into how verdicts are arrived at.
Victims in all this are, in essence, bystanders and sentencing is unscientific, largely without actuarial assessment of risk and so without any calibrated way of protecting the public. Indeed sentences themselves are cake and circuses, given that a four-year prison term usually means two, probation often means little or no supervision and three quarters of fines remain unpaid. If ministers worry that the BMA has an undue influence on the NHS, that is nothing compared to the iron grip that lawyers have on their monopolistic and largely hopeless management of criminality.
How best to consider wholesale legal reform is for another day, but it has huge repercussions for policing. Given that for many years my most public role was to help to catch villains and bring them before the courts, it took me a long time to realise that criminal justice, far from safeguarding victims and providing our first line of defence against wrongdoing, is actually tangential to the ebb and flow of crime. Counterintuitive though it seems, neither conviction rates nor tariffs correlate with rates of victimhood.
We are so used to policing as a conveyor belt to lawyers and the courts that it might seem absurd to suggest an alternative approach. Yet detection is the cuckoo in the nest. Detection has hijacked traditional policing. When Sir Robert Peel finally achieved his dream of “modern” policing 200 years ago, it was all about prevention.
