Systemic Failure Of The Criminal Justice System.

One of the first duties of the State, one of the most potent arguments for the very existence of government, is providing safety for the citizenry. In an attempt to create that, the State has developed a criminal justice system whose explicit aims are – the deterrence of crime, the detection of crime, the punishment of crime, and the rehabilitation of the criminal.

If this system of connected agencies functioned correctly, it would be simply demonstrated by the merest glance at crime statistics. Alas, any criminologist will happily tell you of the many deficiencies in such data, and how they invariably require unpacking. Many factors play into crime numbers, and perhaps the least important part is the actions of the criminal justice system. Population growth, population ages, economic conditions, social mores and conditions, cultural shifts, and technology are amongst some of the factors that go into increases or decrease in crime. Not to mention changes in the way statistics are defined and collected. That said, we can see broad moves and judge whether the components of the criminal justice system deliver what we expect from them, and what we pay them handsomely for.

The police are the first line in our response to crime. You may be rather shocked to discover that the clear-up rate for crimes now stands at under 6%. So 94% of crimes are left unsolved by the police. Expanding on this, the solved rate for murder remains extremely high, the solved rate for property crime is incredibly low. But across the board, the police are just not solving crime. There are many, and complicated, reasons offered for this but at its root is the reality that the police no longer bother investigating crimes such as burglary. You’ll receive a nice letter from Victim Support long before you see an actual copper at your door in response to a call. While campaigners complain that rape prosecutions are so low that rape is effectively decriminalised, the reality is that nearly all the crime that blights our lives is effectively decriminalised. The police are utterly failing to deliver the outcomes we demand and pay for.

Assuming you are one of the very few unlucky criminals to get caught and hauled before the Courts, you’ll have the obstacle course of finding a legal aid solicitor – whose ranks have been decimated – and an available empty court with an actual judge in attendance. The backlog in trials now runs into years. This wreaks havoc on the lives of the accused and the victims alike. If the role of the courts is to judge those accused in a timely manner, the court service joins the police force as being a gross failure that has only got worst over recent years.

But let’s assume you were unlucky enough to get caught in your nefarious deeds, and a lawyer, a court and a judge was found, and you find yourself carted off to the Scrubs. While we all have many and varied views on what prison is meant to achieve, reducing crime is on most of our lists, else prison becomes a hideously expensive empty performance. It is depressing, then, to realise that crime doesn’t stop at the prison gates, that there are hundreds of thousands of assaults in prison each year. Prisons are riddled with crime, most of it unknown to the authorities.

Whilst we too easily shrug off what happens within prisons, prisoners are released. And on the measure that matters – reoffending – then the prison service returns to society people who have a 50% chance of reoffending. The economic cost alone of this reoffending is estimated to be 50 billions. If prison is measured by how it cuts crime, it has failed from the time we laid the first brick. By now it is horribly clear that the Golden Thread that weaves through criminal justice is failure. Failure by the police, failure by the Courts, and failure by the prison service. Individually and systematically they fall far short of what any reasonable person can expect from them – safety of our property and person. There is no other part of government that delivers so much failure for such a large cost. And while we may grumpily accept poor performance from other parts of government, failure in criminal justice corrodes the very sinews of society and dissolves the bonds between us. As political philosophers have long pointed out, no society can function if what one produces can be randomly appropriated by another.

As civilised as we may be, there remains deep within our species atavistic urges that require some censure and control by the State for the common good. We occasionally need saving from ourselves as well as other people. This is the primary state of government, and recent disorders remind us that when belief in the competence of criminal justice is eroded, some are disinhibited from cooperating with that system and maintain social order.

There is no simple remedy for these gross, systemic failures. There is no set of alternatives shining like a beacon in the darkness. All we can do, what we MUST do, is take the first step and admit the failures of criminal justice to cut crime. We will never search for solutions unless we can honestly look the problem in the eye.

Ben Gunn is “one of Britain’s best known prisoners…he constantly questions authority and exposes the futility of the system” The Times. Pleading guilty to the murder of a friend when he was 14 years old, Ben has since renounced violence and consistently fought for the recognition of the inherent dignity of all human beings. As a result of speaking truth to power, Ben has served far longer than the recommended 10 years, leading Education Secretary Michael Gove to argue that Ben “has been punished excessively for a crime committed as a child”, and Lord Ramsbotham to state that “It is expensive and unnecessary to keep Ben Gunn in prison”.