Bring Back National Service............and the Birch........and Zero Tolerance..........and David Blunkett?....and Jack Straw?

The past week has seen a cornucopia of opinion and counter opinion in relation to the shocking events that swept so many cities in this country. From Melanie Phillips blaming the "liberal intelligentsia" (Melanie darling you are SO last season!) or the delightful Nadine Dorries citing the "moral vacuum"....ah yes dear, so that's what you are blaming for your own lack of moral fortitude is it? Now let's check out your alleged behaviour - hmmmm, adultery, lying and stealing? Not bad to be going on with. But of course, you haven't been caught looting Louboutins from Selfridges, no you were able to loot the public purse without breaking a single window! Rather like your millionaire pal George "we're all in this together" Osborne - you just don't get irony! This is in marked contrast it has to be said to the brave and perceptive Peter Oborne, whose analysis in his Telegraph piece this week was characteristically spot on. Ah, now there's a man the right could do well to look to for their moral compass.

Up and down the country, sorry England, sentences are being dished out like smarties. Sentences that on the face of it appear to betray a knee jerk response to a phenomenon that has at least unsettled and at worst shocked us all.

As a party we are committed to evidence based practice, now, more than ever, we need to demonstrate that this is what distinguishes us from our Tory partners. The likes of Phillips and Dorries may, rather like Cameron and May, want to absolve their class from any responsibility by dumping it in part on those immoral nasty liberals, but let's consider the facts. We have had decades of totally illiberal political leadership! Thatcher - liberal? Major - liberal? Blair - liberal? Brown - liberal? Cameron.........ah yes, claimed to be a liberal once, but prick him and does he not bleed pure illiberality?!

So this morning, as the dust of the last turbulent week (is it only a week?) settles - we have the unedifying spectacle of a prime minister, clearly out of his depth, calling for.......you've guessed it ZERO TOLERANCE. Oh and then we have that novel idea, being touted in the Express that the real answer is NATIONAL SERVICE (that'll sort them out, give'em some discipline in their lives........er......I joined voluntarily and look at me!). So let's look at what happens after people come out of the armed services - disproportionately homeless, disproportionately street drinkers, disproportionately suffering from mental health conditions. Now if our prime minister's argument is to be extended to its logical conclusion, given that our "feral youth" are the products of dysfunctional parents and a sick society, presumably there are some of our service personnel who are the product of our dysfunctional and sick armed forces??? But, maybe they're right, much better to train our "feral youths" to beat up and kill foreigners in Afghanistan Iraq or Libya than let them loose over here.

Having spent the best part of my life working with and for young people (and scarily that is now a very long time!) I have lived through many moral panics. The last week is no different. And frankly isn't that different from moral panics about youth throughout the ages. Even Socrates described the youth of his day as having contempt for authority, being disrespectful to their elders, tyrannising their teachers. But, what is different in every case is the environment in which such behaviour takes place - the values which people accept or reject - the messages our young people are getting from the society in which they either participate or feel disaffected from. And given this government's belief in "nudge" theory and behavioural economics, it seems extraordinary if they do not consider this as part of what must be a proper inquiry into what happened.

So it seems to me that what this country desperately needs is a truly liberal response to what are clearly complex problems. I may have been a little reticent in expressing my anxieties about the coalition, but surely this is a golden opportunity for us to stand up and challenge so much of this knee-jerk rhetoric? Most of us agree that short sentences don't work, and many Liberal Democrats (including myself) are ambassadors for Make Justice Work, the campaign which highlights the wastefulness of short term sentences and promotes more intensive community sentencing. We also agree with using restorative justice as an alternative to custodial sentences, surely given what as happened and the evidence of how effective this approach is, our leadership should be making this point? Being faced with the consequences of your criminal behaviour can be not only far more difficult for a young person to cope with, but also is far more likely to get them to reform their ways.

At the moment there is talk of some 3000 arrests and no doubt there will be many more, like Cameron and Johnson in their youth, who will escape justice. Do we honestly believe ALL of these rioters were criminals? Or is it more logical to conclude that there was a hardened criminal element but that many more, particularly young people, were drawn in by the mob mentality? Those young people more than any will be far more likely to respond positively with being confronted with the enormity of the consequences of their behaviour. What's that saying about acting in haste and repenting at leisure? (both young people and politicians). Don't we know that our prisons are universities of crime?

What we need now is true political leadership, a recognition that if we truly are "all in this together" we all have to take some blame for what has happened as well as some responsibility for finding solutions. There are a good few things I disagree with Nick Clegg on (!) and we have had many arguments about, however, my primary reason for supporting his leadership was that I knew him to be a true liberal, I knew that on youth issues in general and youth justice in particular, he absolutely got the need to have a liberal approach. Nick Clegg, Simon Hughes, Lynne Featherstone (another two who absolutely gets it!) and our parliamentary team have never had a better opportunity to show that leadership, to take that opportunity we allegedly joined the coalition to promote - an opportunity to ensure we try that which has never been tried in living memory - that truly liberal response.

The true cost of locking up our children

Today, as a Make Justic Work ambassador, I am off to watch the first screening of "The Fear Factory" in Leicester Square, followed by the launch off the latest NEF report "Punishing Costs". I havc no doubt I will emerge fired up and angry about a system that does nothing to reduce crime and everything to destroy young lives.

NEF Press Release below:

Locking up children and young people for non-violent offences is costing the
taxpayer millions, while doing little to reduce the amount of crime, says a new
report from leading independent think-tank nef (the new economics foundation).
The report, Punishing Costs, launched today Monday 1 March 2010, calls into question the
plans of both Labour and Conservative politicians to invest in new prisons. At a time when
almost all public services are facing drastic cuts, it is more vital than ever to scrutinise
spending on prisons. The report shows how the number of young people and children in
prison could be drastically reduced, and how a change in the pattern of public investment
can increase the safety of our streets.

The launch of the report is set to coincide with the first public screening of The Fear
Factory, a timely new documentary that exposes the history, mechanics and extent of fear
mongering that has led to the UK’s criminal justice crisis. The film has given rise to a
coalition of over 40 organisations, including nef, which calls for an end to the political arms
race on law and order.

The report found that:
! England and Wales imprison proportionally more under-aged children than
almost all other Western European countries. Relatively minor offences can result in
custodial sentences: research by Barnardo’s showed that 82% of 12-14 year-olds in
custody had never committed a violent offence.

! Serving a prison sentence makes it more likely for children to continue offending
after they have been released.

! Time spent in prison also makes it more likely for children to be unemployed in
the future, to have lower income, be disconnected from education and have unstable
living conditions

! Holding a child in prison costs about £100,000 a year. The report also shows that
the harmful consequences of imprisonment result in at least £40,000 of further indirect
costs to the state. These include continuing crime and higher unemployment after
release.

The authors make recommendations about how to change the situation, to deliver better
value for taxpayers, safer streets and a better deal for excluded young people:

! Devolve budgets for prison places to local authorities. At the moment, prison
places are paid for by central government. Transferring the costs to local governments
– together with more power over how they can arrange youth justice services locally –
would remove the perverse incentive to put young people in prison. The councils would
be allowed to keep some of the savings created from reducing custody, which could be
reinvested in the reduction of crime.

! Local authorities can reduce the use of imprisonment by 13% without need for
controversial legislative change or a large increase in public spending. The
policies considered include better co-operation between local agencies and courts, and
using interventions of restorative justice that allow offenders to repair the damage they
have caused in the community. These changes can result in over £60 million of
savings in England, and over £2 million for some local authority areas.

“Prison costs the public purse about six times more than sending a child to Eton,” said
Aleksi Knuutila, researcher at nef and author of the report. “What really makes our
obsessive use of prisons even more of a tragedy is that those resources could have been
used to tackle crime much more effectively. The resources we now waste on locking
children up could be spent on measures that would really keep our streets safer. All the
research shows that prison is failing to rehabilitate offenders and isn’t steering them away
from crime. At a time when public services are being cut everywhere, we need to ask
whether our spending is really delivering on safety in our neighbourhoods.”

"These important findings support the case for diverting vulnerable young people away
from prison whenever possible," said Juliet Lyon, Director of the Prison Reform Trust.
"Currently many children who are not a threat to public safety are put behind bars. A policy
of budget devolvement would encourage local authorities to deal with minor offending
locally, instead of relying on a central prison system. Community measures have been
shown to reduce offending much more effectively than any length of prison sentence. We
urgently need to change the pattern of public investment. Currently we spend a lot dealing
with the consequences when social problems turn into crime. The suggestions in this report
would free up scarce resources which could then be directed towards the welfare of
children and their neighbourhoods - stopping crime before it starts and reducing the need
for prison.