COMMENSAL ISSUE 88

Few could regard our present criminal justice system as anything other than a farce: jails equipped with gymnasia so that some violent mugger will find it even easier to beat you up next time; free association between prisoners so that the ambitious career criminal can make the right contacts or organise the next riot; prisons wherein drugs are incredibly even more readily available than on the street; a prison regime in general which only the one-off criminal who wouldn't do it again anyway is likely to find unpleasant; and, of course, sentences which are mainly a public relations exercise and bear little relationship to any actual period of detention.

The whole system even starts with basic unfairness. Apart from the obvious, such as when protecting your own property can bring heavier penalties than stealing somebody else’s, the penalties for committing an actual crime owe more to blind chance than logic. Not only can different judges pass different sentences for identical crimes but the chance outcomes of the same basic crimes can result in very different treatments. A push while stealing someone's bag can result in anything from hurt pride to death but does the outcome make it a different crime ?

I would like to propose a system which I suggest to be fair, simple, relatively inexpensive, sufficiently humane to be applied to juveniles, and of considerable assistance in improving detection rates. Firstly, it recognises just two offences: theft, (depriving another of the use or enjoyment of anything to which they have a legally defined right); and violence, (causing, threatening, or risking injury to another without their consent, except in cases where the other was committing an offence). Theft counts as one offence; violence as two. All penalties rely on the basis of a surgically implanted tracking device enabling offenders to be monitored automatically by satellite, yet continue with their lives, and thus have a far better chance of recovery than at present. Penalties increase in an orderly fashion according to the running total of the number of offences committed. Sentences would be in two parts: firstly imposing a limited range of travel (say from fifty miles to fifty yards); secondly setting the period of monitoring (say from one year to life). Breaching the limits or interfering with the device would be an offence counting as one.

I believe this system to be sufficiently lenient as to allow for intolerance of multiple recidivism. I therefore propose a final sanction of death on anyone recording a score of, say five, as a necessary public safeguard and one which ought not to encourage murder because of the virtual inevitability of being caught.

Anthony Owens

Anthony : I’m not sure chance plays as much of a role in crime as you suggest, or at least not in the direction you suggest. Pushing a 90-year-old over in order to steal her handbag may not result in serious injury, in which case the criminal has got away with a potentially violent crime. If it does result in injury, he deserves the sentence for GBH as serious injury could have been anticipated as the likely outcome. Saying "boo !" to a 20-year-old who, unbeknown to you, has a heart condition and dies of a heart attack, should not result in a conviction for manslaughter as the outcome could not have been fairly anticipated.

You must be joking concerning the "red card = black cap" suggestion ! I presume you would be happy executing a kleptomaniac ? I’d anticipate those with 4 points resisting arrest with a degree of vigour. Are there really only two categories of crime ?

Theo