BLAIR’S BRITAIN, 1997–2007
Page 54
The nature of criminal justice policy-making has also changed markedly
in the last decade. There have been substantial changes within the Home
Office, culminating in the splitting of the department into two parts.
Crucially, the centre of gravity in criminal justice policy-making has
shifted, with the Prime Minister and the Cabinet Office occupying an
increasingly important role. Significant changes in the Home Office had
already begun under Michael Howard’s tenure as Home Secretary
between 1993 and 1997. Senior civil servants of long standing have been
replaced by individuals drawn from other areas of public life, often with
little experience of policy-making. The policy-making process in this
field has become more politicised47 with the emphasis on ‘delivery’
driving performance. Political, policy and special advisers have become
more prominent, as has No. 10 and the Cabinet Office.
46 Quoted in Rod Morgan, ‘With Respect to Order, the Rules of the Game Have Changed:
New Labour’s Dominance of the ‘Law And Order’ Agenda’, in Tim Newburn and Paul
Rock (eds.), The Politics of Crime Control: Essays in Honour of David Downes (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 2006), p. 101.
47 Ian Loader, ‘Fall of the “Platonic Guardians” ’, British Journal of Criminology, 46(4), 2006:
561–86.
Blair’s role has been central. Seemingly ill at ease leaving home affairs
to his Home Secretaries, Blair surrounded himself with policy teams and
advisers, producing a stream of ideas and initiatives, by no means all well
thought through. Controversially, in 2000 the ex-Director-General of the
BBC, John Birt, became an unpaid special adviser to the Prime Minister,
where his responsibilities included drawing up a ‘10-year crime plan’.48
Although there is no evidence that Burt’s eventual report49 had much
impact,50 it is the fact of his appointment – with no experience in the
field, and working directly to the PM rather than the Home Secretary –
that is significant. As noted earlier, there have been regular ‘summits’ in
Downing Street to debate the latest crime problems, and several reviews
of crime policy conducted outside the Home Office, all suggesting that
Blair perceived crime policy as central to his government’s and his own
success.
Smart and tough? PR and penal policy
Central to the shift from ‘Old’ to ‘New’ Labour was the utilisation of
public relations techniques in the presentation of the party and policy
initiatives. From the famous ‘tough on crime, tough on the causes of
crime’ soundbite onwards, image management has played a significant
role. This had three main aspects: creating and announcing policy in ways
that are expected to play well in the tabloid press; using crime announcements to divert attention from other ‘bad news’ stories; and, crucially,
using crime initiatives as a regular vehicle for placing stories that aim,
at least in part, to convey positive (tough) messages about the Prime
Minister.
Gaining attention
New Labour took much from the Clinton Democrats. Writing in 1993,
Patricia Hewitt and Phillip Gould suggested that ‘the lessons which the
British left can learn [from the US] are not so much about content –although there is valuable intellectual exchange already under way – as
48 ‘Birt Becomes Number 10 Adviser’, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/1483994.stm
(accessed 21 May 2007).
49 The report is available at: www.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/foi/pdf/crime.pdf.
50 It has been said that it was Birt who alerted Blair to the significance of drugs in relation to
crime, and he certainly produced a later report on the topic, not all of which has been published. It does not seem to have had any impact on policy. Cf. Alan Travis, ‘Prescribe Free
Heroin: Birt’s Secret Advice to Ministers’, The Guardian, 9 February 2006.
about process’ . 51 Ensuring that headlines aimed at ‘Middle England’
(what the Clintonites called the ‘working middle class’ in the US)
displayed sufficient ‘tough-on-crime’ credentials was a central concern.
Consequently, tough-sounding terminology such as ‘zero tolerance’ and
‘three strikes and you’re out’ were regularly deployed in speeches and
newspaper articles by Blair and successive Home Secretaries.52 Punitive
rhetoric has been an ever-present feature of New Labour’s method.53
Writing for, and to, the tabloid press was also a core tactic, to announce
policy initiatives or, occasionally, to respond personally to criticism.54
Diverting attention
Particularly when under pressure Blair’s administrations have sought to
hide bad news by making ‘new’ policy announcements or quickly suggesting new initiatives. From the start crime has been central to such
tactics. In early 1999 the controversial ‘three strikes and you’re out’ provision for burglary, introduced as part of Michael Howard’s 1997 Crime
(Sentences) Act but put on hold by Jack Straw, was suddenly activated in
the midst of the row over Peter Mandelson’s home loan.55 More recently,
as the story of the Home Office’s mishandling of foreign national prisoners was beginning to unfold, the Prime Minister and new Home Secretary
immediately announced a series of initiatives, including the possible
introduction of a paedophile notification scheme along the lines of the
US Megan’s Law (an idea floated and rejected several years previously),
as well as another proposed ‘radical overhaul’ of the criminal justice
system to ‘safeguard the human rights of victims at the expense of
offenders’.56
Framing Blair
In the years leading up to the 1997 election victory, crime worked well
for Blair. His speech after the murder of James Bulger, and the ‘tough
on crime’ sound-bite, powerfully illustrated how effective crime stories
could be in the positive presentation of self to the electorate. Once in
51 Patricia Hewitt and Phillip Gould, ‘Lessons from America: Learning from Success –
Labour and Clinton’s New Democrats’, Renewal, 1(1), 1993: 45–51.
52 Tim Newburn and Trevor Jones, ‘Symbolising Crime Control: Reflections on Zero
Tolerance’, Theoretical Criminology, 11(2), 2007: 221–43.
53 Norman Fairclough, New Labour, New Language (London: Routledge, 2000).
54 ‘Rattled: Blair Pens 975 Words to The Sun in his Defence’, The Sun, 2 May 2000.
55 www.guardian.co.uk/guardianpolitics/story/0,,321637,00.html (accessed 21 May 2007).
56 ‘Blair to Launch Overhaul of Criminal Justice’, The Guardian, 16 June 2006.
power, Blair continued to use the media in this way, with increasingly
mixed results. Ill-thought-through initiatives, such as marching offenders to cashpoint machines, were spotted for what they were, and sat
uneasily with longer-term Home Office policies. Perhaps the best illustration emerged from another attempt to hide a bad news story by a policy
announcement. In a handwritten memo writ
ten in April 2000 – but
leaked some time later – Blair made clear his preferred strategy:
On crime, we need to highlight the tough measures: compulsory tests for
drugs before bail . . . the extra number of burglars jailed under ‘three
strikes and you’re out’. Above all, we must deal now with street crime . . .
When the figures are published . . . they will show a small – 4 per cent – rise
in crime. But this will almost entirely be due to the rise in levels of street
crime – mobile phones, bags being snatched. This will be worst in London.
The Met Police are putting in place measures to deal with it; but as ever, we
lack a tough public message along with the strategy. We should think now
of an initiative, e.g. locking up street muggers. Something tough, with
immediate bite that sends a message through the system . . . But this
should be done soon and I, personally, should be associated with it.57
Blair’s long-standing interest in crime policy, and his early successes in
using it to party and personal advantage, have coloured New Labour
criminal justice policy. Much of the government’s ‘initiativitis’ in this
area, and its tendency to undermine medium and long-term policy programmes with short-term, apparently knee-jerk initiatives – or, indeed,
merely ‘kite-flying’ for a quick headline – can be laid at Blair’s door.
Ironically, for an administration so wedded to image-management as a
core component of governing, the consequence has been a confused
and at times incoherent public presentation of criminal justice policymaking.
What worked? New Labour’s criminal justice balance sheet
As outlined earlier, according to the BCS there have been substantial
drops in overall crime levels in the past decade: over a third between 1997
and 2006. During this time the Blair governments were hyperactive in the
law-and-order sphere, talking tough, passing legislation, creating new
offences, and making enforcement against low-level incivilities a central
plank of their strategy. One consequence has been an extraordinarily
57 The Sun, 17 July 2000; the full text of the memo is available at: http://news.bbc.co.uk/
1/hi/uk_politics/836822.stm (accessed 21 May 2007).
rapid expansion in the numbers in custody (from around 62,000 in 1997
to 80,000 by 200658), as well as greater numbers receiving community
sentences. How do the trends in crime and punishment relate to each
other, and what other factors do we need to take into account in understanding these trends?
Growing penal severity has not resulted from increasing crime, but
because the sanctions imposed by the courts have become harder. A firsttime domestic burglar had a 27% chance of being sent to prison in 1995.
By 2000 this had risen to 48%. In addition, average sentence lengths for
such offenders rose from sixteen to eighteen months. Over half of the
increase in custodial sentencing was for people with no previous convictions. Similar trends can be seen in relation to community penalties: twothirds of the increase between 1991 and 2001 involved offenders with no
previous convictions.59 There is no evidence of any substantial increase in
the number of offences being brought to court, or that those offences
being prosecuted are more serious than before.60 Rather, it appears that
the post-1993 second-order consensus on punitive crime policy is the
major factor behind the punishment binge.61
There is growing evidence that sentencers are affected not only by the
legislative context in which they work but also by the general mood, the
penal zeitgeist.62 Although sentencers in Britain are significantly more
protected from public opinion than their peers in, say, the United States,
they are by no means entirely insulated. Given the general political mood
in the last decade or more – one of largely unrelieved populist punitiveness – there can be little surprise that decision-making in the courts has
resulted in ever harsher treatment of offenders.
Have the substantial increases in punishment brought about the crime
drop? Here, research evidence is reasonably consistent: the substantial
increases in incarceration do have a bearing on the crime drops measured
in the UK and elsewhere, but only a relatively small one. Although there
are several ways in which imprisonment might plausibly have an effect on
crime rates – via the rehabilitation of offenders sentenced to custody, or
through a deterrent effect on the population generally or more specifically on those punished – it is the incapacitation effect that seems most
58 Rod Morgan and Alison Liebling, ‘Imprisonment: An Expanding Scene’, in Maguire et al.,
The Oxford Handbook of Criminology, pp. 1100–1.
59 Sir Patrick Carter, Managing Offenders, Reducing Crime (London: TSO, 2003).
60 Michael Hough, Jessica Jacobson and Andrew Millie, The Decision to Imprison: Sentencing
and the Prison Population (London: Prison Reform Trust, 2003).
61 Reiner, Law and Order, ch. 5.
62 Newburn, ‘Tough on Crime’.
likely to have the greatest impact. However, the research results are not
overly impressive. Evaluating such effects some years ago, a previous head
of the Home Office’s research unit concluded that a ‘change in the use
of custody of the order of 25 per cent would be needed to produce a
1 per cent change in the level of crime’.63 More recently, the Home Office
concluded that the prison population would need to increase by 15% for
a crime reduction of 1%,64 but this probably overestimates the incapacitation effect.65
If massive increases in levels of punishment, particularly incarceration, were the primary cause of the crime drop then this should be most
visible in the United States, where substantial drops in overall crime since
the mid-1970s (though violent crime only dropped since the early 1990s)
have been accompanied by more than a sixfold increase in the incarceration rate. A number of very careful research studies have produced estimates ranging from around 10%66 to 25%67 of the crime drop being
attributable to the dramatic increase in incarceration.
Comparative research casts further doubt on increased punishment as
the prime suspect in the crime drop. Crime rates in the majority of
English-speaking and European countries show a similar trend to England
and Wales: rising since the 1950/1960s until the early to mid-1990s, and
then levelling off or falling.68 However, this was not accompanied everywhere by a punishment surge. Notably, Canada69 and Scotland,70 neighbours of the US and England, achieved similar crime declines without
substantial increases in imprisonment. Similarly, although there have been
drops in crime, imprisonment rates have remained relatively stable in
63 Roger Tarling, Analysing Offending (London: HMSO, 1993), p. 154.
64 John Halliday, Making Punishments Work (London: Home Office, 2001).
65 Anthony Bottoms, ‘Empirical Research Relevant to Sentencing Frameworks’, in
A. Bottoms, S. Rex and G. Robinson (eds.), Alternatives to Prison (Cullompton: Willan,
2004), pp. 66–72.
66 John Donohue
and Peter Siegelman, ‘Allocating Resources among Prisons and Social
Programs in the Battle against Crime’, Journal of Legal Studies, 27(1), 1998: 1–43.
67 William Spelman, ‘The Limited Importance of Prison Expansion’, in Alfred Blumstein
and Joel Wallman (eds.), The Crime Drop in America (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 2000).
68 Michael Tonry and David P. Farrington, ‘Crime and Punishment in Western Countries,
1980–1999’, in Michael Tonry (ed.), C rime and Justice: A Review of Research (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2005).
69 Anthony Doob and Cheryl Webster, ‘Countering Punitiveness: Understanding Stability in
Canada’s Imprisonment Rate’, Law and Society Review, 40(2), 2006: 325–68.
70 David J. Smith, ‘Crime and Punishment in Scotland’, in Michael Tonry and David P.
Farrington, Crime and Punishment in Western Countries, 1980–1999 (Chicago: Chicago
University Press, 2005).
Germany, Japan and Belgium. One is forced to conclude that any assumption ‘that there is a simple, common, or invariant relationship between
the crime patterns that befall a country and the number of people it confines is wrong. Faced with similar crime trends, different countries react in
different ways.’71
If increased imprisonment provides only a very partial explanation of
the crime drop, what of policing and crime prevention? Here the evidence is more positive. Analysing the very substantial 1990s drop in
crime in New York City, Zimring recently concluded that the ‘best estimate of the level of crime reduction achieved [by the policing changes in
the city] is between a quarter and a half the recorded decline’.72 Even if
this is accurate – and others have questioned the policing impact73 – there
are many American cities that experienced substantial declines in crime
without similar policing changes. More importantly for our purposes,
the policing reforms in England have been quite unlike those undertaken
in New York. Nevertheless, it remains plausible that the substantial
increases in police numbers in England, together with improved working
practices, have had a crime reduction impact. Add to this the reforms of
the youth justice system (though there is some dispute over the extent of