POLITICS

The Howard League for Personal Advancement gets austere

ANDREW GIMSON

The belief that our prisons are, in the words of the Home Secretary, Mr Michael Howard, 'too lax', is not new. It is found in a fascinating book by J.K. Stanford, Tail of an Army, in which he relates his experi- ences during the second world war. Colonel Stanford had been a fighting soldier during the first war, but on returning to the colours in 1939 was given a succession of jobs in supply, notably in Le Havre and Cairo, during which he became more and more indignant at the amazing amount of waste, racketeering and straightforward theft he witnessed.

It seemed to him that 'a relaxation of dis- cipline such as became fashionable in pris- ons about 1929' was in large part to blame. One may note that Decline and Fall, in which a prisoner is given a set of carpen- ter's tools and uses them to saw off the chaplain's head, was published in 1928.

And now Mr Howard has taken up the idea that prison should become, in the exquisitely restrained phrase of his princi- pal private secretary, Miss J. MacNaughton, 'a more austere experience'. The important question is not whether this theory is true, but whether Mr Howard really believes it.

One's first reaction, on hearing the leaked news of his belief, was that the man is a clever lawyer, adept at finding argu- ments his clients like the sound of. In just over a month he has to address the Conser- vative Party Conference: surely he is float- ing the invaluable-role-for-leg-irons theory with that audience in mind? It sounds like a policy devised by the Howard League for Personal Advancement.

The suspicion that Mr Howard has no personal attachment to the policy strength- ens when one learns that the Home Office is to hold a seminar on the subject in mid- September. Holding a seminar is one of the Government's most favoured means of hid- ing, or attempting to hide, the fact that it has no idea what to do.

But for 14 years we have all been able to see the Government has no idea what to do about crime. That is why it matters whether Mr Howard believes in his new policy. If even he doesn't, why should we? 'Officials will regard it as so much hot air,' as one close observer of the Home Office remarked to me this week. Mr Howard will be like a family doctor who examines a patient, agrees the malady is serious and suggests a course of treatment in which, it is clear to the patient, not even the doctor believes.

Doctors who behave like that lack authority. So do Home Secretaries, and the problem of crime is in essence one of authority. We have become so technocratic in our way of thinking that when we ask what to do about crime, we expect a techni- cal answer. We assume, or at least try to kid ourselves, that there is some technical way of dealing with crime.

The current techniques for tackling crime include making great efforts not to send people to prison (where it is argued they will become more hardened criminals) and finding ways to rehabilitate them in the community. When people have committed such terrible crimes that they have to be locked up, the modern consensus is that they must still be rehabilitated. The direc- tor-general of the Prison Service, Mr Derek Lewis, spoke this week of 'the need to ensure that prisoners' time is constructively occupied . . . to help prepare prisoners for a law-abiding life'.

The unconscious evasiveness and arro- gance of this remark would be hard to exaggerate. Of course prisoners who want to go straight should be helped, but what about the prisoners who don't? Or does Mr Lewis imagine his civics classes and rafia work will always do the trick? If so, he is not a liberal but a technocratic totalitarian of unbounded naivety.

Or else he is soft. Lord Salisbury once remarked, in another context, that sweep- ing concessions made by the government 'have conveyed. . . a conviction rather of our softness than our liberality'. Exactly the same objection holds good for the Govern- ment's approach to crime. The authorities have tried to conceal their almost total loss of nerve by pretending to be wonderfully liberal.

The Home Office is desperately anxious to reduce the prison population. Strong lib- eral arguments can be advanced for reduc- ing it, and honourable liberals can be found who believe those arguments. But few of the Home Office politicians and officials who deal with these matters can be classi- fied as honourable liberals. Their first motive for emptying the prisons is to reduce the risk of riots with which they themselves would have to deal, a task of which they proved quite incapable during the Strangeways riot, when naked criminals taunted the authorities for days on end from the roof of the jail.

After various prison disturbances we had the Criminal Justice Act, which made it harder to send people to jail. This was a victory for the rioters and a defeat for the courts. The authorities had demonstrated their unwillingness to meet force with supe- rior force. Not surprisingly, their authority has suffered.

When I visited, a year or two ago, a hous- ing estate in the Midlands where a riot was in progress, the safest place to be was in the pub, because the rioters respected the land- lord. They knew the landlord, who was about Mr Howard's age, would not stand for any trouble. He had only to appear in the door of his pub and the rioters, most of whom were about 15 years old, ran away. When a dozen police vans arrived, the riot- ers hurled rocks at them. The landlord was a large man, and kept a heavy wooden club behind the bar. He had to use it about three times a year.

Mr Howard does not have the publican's air of natural authority, but I feel we must give him a chance. No matter what policy he may announce to deal with crime, whether 'liberal' or 'reactionary', it will fail if we can tell he is not serious about it. Window-dressing might see him through the Conservative Conference, for, contrary to received wisdom, the hangers and flog- gers of the Conservative Party are not that hard to please. They feel so worried about crime, and have been fed for so many years on a thin diet of pseudo-liberal solutions, they are grateful for whatever scraps of pseudo-toughness a Conservative Home Secretary contrives to throw them.

But the country will not be fooled by win- dow-dressing. Consider the crisis of author- ity facing the courts. Crime without punish- ment seems, to the law-abiding public, to have become the rule. 'We are all fed up with persistent offenders being let off light- ly,' as the outgoing Chief Constable of Gloucestershire said last week. To address that crisis, Mr Howard will have to announce that nothing would please him more than a far larger prison population, and mean it. The point is not, in itself, the policy (which in time might even lead to a smaller prison population), but the under- lying determination of authority not to be mocked.