As the victims of street murders mount, the usual suspects interject to argue for sending even fewer violent criminals to prison. The Independent argues:
"While not patronising the public about the seriousness of knife crime in Britain, we must not resort to facile-sounding solutions that simply fill up prisons."
Notice how the simplicity of locking up dangerous people, that it is a response comprehensible to all is - yes, patronisingly - wielded as if it were a trump card that refutes the policy. By a kind of reverse Occam's Razor, 'People inside prison aren't a threat to people outside prison' is too straightforward and tautological to be acceptable as a response to violent crime.
"We need to listen to those who work closest with the kind of youngsters who get involved in inner-city youth crime, such as Camila Batmanghelidjh of Kids Company, who is interviewed in today's Independent. None sees boot camps and tougher, longer prison sentences for young people as even part of the solution. Ms Batmanghelidjh talks, disturbingly, of a new generation of children who are capable of extreme violence as a consequence of, and response to, a combination of neglect and abuse in childhood."
Well, yes, conservatives have long pointed out (often in the face of liberal rage), that insofar as crime has a social 'root cause', it lies in the miseries associated with family breakdown and the decline of traditional marriage. But it hardly follows from this that where a significant part of a generation has grown up in such conditions, it should serve as a get-out-of-jail-free card. Even if marriage, divorce and illegitimacy rates returned to 1950s levels tomorrow, today's young criminals "capable of extreme violence" would remain a serious danger to others and would belong in prison.
People who work to reform young criminals outside prison are often to be greatly admired for their efforts, and the prison debate would be utterly transformed if they ever discover a method of rehabilitation that reliably protects the public better than prison and can be replicated elsewhere. But treating them as disinterested experts, or expecting them to bite the hand that feeds them by declaring that prison is in fact the answer, is expecting turkeys to vote for Christmas.
Certainly there is a constant supply of other people prepared to repeat the same old slurs against incarceration. Precisely why comparatively few experts favour prison for criminals who commit offence after offence is a fascinating issue in its own right, but we are now at the point where one can say that this prejudice against incarceration has nothing to do with the evidence. If these unworldly pundits were willing to admit that no empirical facts, no amount of murder and chaos, will ever change their minds about the futility and wickedness of prison for those who are a danger to others, one could if nothing else admire their honesty.
"These children are chaotic and entirely unsocialised and short, sharp shocks appear unlikely to implant in them the kind of behavioural boundaries that are needed to stop them from re-offending."
Who said anything about short?