We do love the smell of joined up government in the morning
This is not to advocate for one policy or another, rather to insist that one or the other has to be the policy.
Senior advisers to Labour have warned that, with police solving just 5.5 per cent of all crimes, a third of the rate of seven years ago, offenders have become “emboldened” by the low chances of being caught, convicted and jailed.
OK, via Gary Becker we get the insistence that prison - or any other punishment - operates by mathematics. It’s the severity of the punishment times the odds of it actually being suffered which is the incentive. Or disincentive perhaps. So, if the chance of even being found - let alone punished - is only one in twenty then whatever the punishment is there’s not much disincentive there. Or, given the way mathematics works in order to provide a disincentive those punishments imposed, when rarely they are, need to be substantial.
Ministers should scrap Conservative plans to build new mega-jails and pour £4bn into the prevention of crime and rehabilitation instead, the former chief inspector of prisons has said.
Which is arguing entirely the other way around.
We’ve also got the recent events around incipient riots. Several year sentences being handed down without delay. And, of course, that 5 years for the JSO laddie who was up before the beak on his eleventh offence. Apparently significant sentences do in fact work. Or so the claim is.
Our own preference is probably to resolve the maths in favour of certainty of punishment allied with the punishment itself being light enough to act as an efficient disincentive only. Note the probably there. But we still do insist that there actually has to be a policy. Either light-ish punishments applied with certainty or terrifying ones in a lottery. For those are the only two choices that work.
Which to choose could be a matter of taste, as our probably is, or it could be a more practical matter. Which is easier, building more prisons or reforming the police so that they’re efficient? #
Tim Worstall