- Home /
- News /
- 2003 /
- January /
- News in Brief; IRR > Comment
COMMENT
New Labour and new authoritarianism in criminal justice
News in Brief; IRR > Comment
COMMENT
New Labour and new authoritarianism in criminal justice
01 January 2003
A government's authoritarianism is marked by the numbers of its citizens it imprisons. Under New Labour the prison population, already rising under the Tories, has soared to over 70,000, so high that even the prison governors - hardly a liberal lobby group - have called for the powers of magistrates to send people to prison to be curbed.
Yet, both in its rhetoric and in its numerous 'modernising' reforms of criminal justice, New Labour has done much to encourage the courts to send more and more people to prison. And it has been primarily in magistrates' courts that the government has found an enthusiastic response to its populist, law and order measures. Between 1989 and 1999 the number of people sent by magistrates to prison each year has risen nearly three-fold, from 18,200 to 53,000. In the same period, the number of prison sentences handed out by the Crown Court has increased only marginally, from 42,600 to 44,600.
Powers to magistrates
Government ministers and officials frequently give voice to their distrust of judges, whom they see as soft on crime, as distinct from magistrates. Hence their drive to have more and more cases dealt with in magistrates' courts. Having failed in attempts to restrict the right of defendants to elect jury trial in many cases, the government has come up with a new wheeze. It will give magistrates greater powers of punishment, raising the maximum prison sentence they can give from 6 to 12 or 18 months. This will enable magistrates to deal with many of the over 50,000 cases they send to the Crown Court each year, primarily because they consider that the defendants deserve longer punishment than magistrates can give under their current powers.
In a majority of these cases that result in conviction, the Crown Court actually gives either a non-custodial sentence or one of 6 months or less - that is, what magistrates could have handed down in the first place. The implication must be that, if magistrates are given power to send more of these defendants to prison and for longer, they will do so. This is bound to lead to a further surge in the prison population.
These defendants will at least have had the opportunity of a trial, albeit a restricted one before magistrates. Other measures in the new crime bill will result in far more people being sent to prison without having been convicted by any court. In particular, it is planned to create a presumption that anyone who is arrested for a further offence while already on bail from a court awaiting trial, should be denied further bail. It is estimated that 100,000 defendants a year may be affected by this measure.
Police and summary punishment
Another indicator of government authoritarianism is its willingness to abandon due process of law in favour of summary punishment. The bill contains provisions to allow the police to impose bail restrictions on anyone they arrest, even before they are charged and brought before a court.
This measure must be seen in the context of the recent rise in the use by the police - spurred on by the government's street crime initiative - of controversial stop-and-search powers, and of even greater black over-representation among those subjected to such treatment. Stop-and-search has long been used in inner city and black communities as a form of general, street-level surveillance and summary punishment, with just one in ten stops resulting in an arrest. But now the police will be able to combine this with more frequent arrests and the power to impose formal restrictions on individuals' liberty through bail conditions, possibly extending over several weeks or months.
In putting forward these measures, the government is in part admitting that its efforts over several years, to bring more of those involved in crime before the courts and to gain legitimate convictions, have failed. Hence the need to by-pass the formal court process and create summary forms of punishment.
Manipulation of court rules