We know there has been a tidal wave of legislation, but it is mind-boggling to discover the size of the tsunami. It is estimated that more than 3,600 new offences have been created. But even more astonishing, as Baroness Stern, a crossbench peer, discovered when she asked, is the number of these that can result in a prison sentence. Believe it or not, there are 1,036 that the official could identify. There may well be more. It is now an imprisonable offence to allow an unlicensed concert to take place in a church hall. You can go to prison if your child fails to attend school, or if you smoke in a public place, or if you fail to obtain a passport for your pet donkey or if you are a child caught in possession of a firework at any time other than on or around November 5 or New Year's Day. No doubt, children letting off fireworks are behaving in an anti-social way; but no reasonable person regards this as meriting imprisonment. This development is uniquely a New Labour phenomenon. All governments introduce new laws; but this one has turned legislation into an obsessive political tic, and one that has become more pronounced, not least with the requirement to implement EU directives. In 1997, there were 52 imprisonable new laws; by 2003, the annual tally was 181, there were another 174 in 2005 and 133 in 2007. Bizarrely, fishermen who do not ask for permission before fishing on the Lower Esk in Scotland can also be jailed, as can anyone caught importing "an unauthorised veterinary product". Among the offences created in the past five years, though not necessarily imprisonable ones, are disturbing a pack of eggs when instructed not to by an authorised officer; offering for sale a game bird killed on a Sunday or Christmas Day; attaching an ear tag to an animal when it has previously been used to identify another animal; landing a catch which includes unsorted fish at a harbour without permission; selling types of flora and fauna not native to the UK, such as the grey squirrel, ruddy duck or Japanese knotweed. The crimes which most of us consider to be such have been illegal for centuries, though it must be conceded that the new offence of "creating a nuclear explosion" is both contemporary and necessary, and certainly criminal. It was created in 1998; was it not a crime before? It is, however, shocking to find so many new imprisonable offences when so many long-standing crimes, like assault and theft, go unpunished. What people want is the enforcement of the laws we have, not the creation of more than 1,000 new ones of marginal importance. Most of these "crimes" would never have been regarded as such in the past. They would have been minor infractions of prevailing social mores, or misdemeanours that might warrant a fine, a ticking-off, or even ostracism. But the criminalisation of what would once have been considered bad behaviour has been marked over the past 20 or so years. Activities that were never unlawful, like smoking in a public place, are now crimes because they are objectionable; yet eating a burger and chips on a crowded train, equally revolting, is not and nor should it be. This failure to distinguish between a crime and a wrongdoing has warped the criminal justice system. As Lady Stern said: "The Government has gone mad in looking to use criminal justice law as a way to deal with social problems. It is extraordinary." However, it is almost certainly the case that many imprisonable offences created in recent years are not used to incarcerate anyone. Given the unwillingness of the courts to lock up people who deserve to be, it would be bizarre if they were handing out jail terms to anglers. The potential prison sentence is just tacked on to the end of the legislation for no obvious reason other than because it can. The Government says these offences are all fully debated by Parliament, but many are brought in on secondary legislation which is hardly scrutinised at all; and all Bills are timetabled in any case. It does not make a newly-created crime any more palatable simply because it has been rammed through Parliament using a heavily-whipped government majority and by MPs who pay hardly any attention to what they are doing. In a House of Lords debate before Christmas, Lady Stern quoted from Governing Through Crime by Jonathan Simon, professor of law at Berkeley in California. He wrote: "Social problems have been reconceptualised as crimes, with an attendant focus on assigning fault and imposing consequences." The outcome is "to erode social trust and, with it, the very scaffolding of a 'free' society". There is a message here for all the political parties, not just Labour, to stop the criminal justice arms race. Could they resolve for the New Year neither to introduce nor propose any more laws unless absolutely necessary? Why is Labour so keen to imprison us?
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/philipjohnston/4109358/Why-is-Labour-so-keen-to-imprison-us.html
A quite extraordinary statistic has been dug out of the deepest quarries of Whitehall by a diligent government official following an inquiry about the number of laws introduced by Labour since taking office in 1997.
Sunday, 4 January 2009
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