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When perception is the problem

12 May 2003

When it comes to votes, public perception matters more than statistical reality. This makes politicians say (and do) foolish things. In the end we all pay for it.

Sentencing in criminal cases is a subject that always generates a good deal of hot air. Successive Home Secretaries, otherwise intelligent, rational, even-handed men, successively part company with the problem they are mostly trying to solve, when encouraged, as Mr Blunkett was this week, into hasty criticism of the judiciary for its leniency. It is a criticism that Mr Blunkett, like his predecessors, will have the leisure to repent of when he contemplates the prisons policy necessary to give effect to these new principles.

Mr Blunkett does not quite say leniency. He says inconsistency, and he wants a statutory framework of minimum sentences to prevent this. But you know what he means when he invokes the feelings of the victims as a way of explaining his new policy. He senses votes in minimum sentences, public support for a tough approach to create the impression that the problem is being tackled and being solved.

What problem? As usual, this question does not feature in a policy that is designed merely to sound sensible and feel good. Criminal sentencing is supposed to combine punishment with deterrence and the removal of opportunity. Punishment is the moral element, intended to alert the felon to the error of his ways. Deterrence is the bit that says that the punishment is unpleasant and best avoided by not committing crime. Removal of opportunity is the attractive notion that a burglar in prison is a burglar who cannot, at that moment, be a-burgling.

One way or another, all three elements add up to the intention to keep down the level of crime in society. This is a credible policy objective: crime in society is a bad thing. It's particularly bad for the victims of crime, as Mr Blunkett and his predecessors have liked to remind us, but since most of us are not and will not be the victims of serious crime they have also liked to remind us about the social evil generated by the fear of crime.

The scope here for policy confusion is immense. Two quite different tests for successful policy are implied. One is the level of criminal activity: is there more or less crime? The other is a test of perception: is crime more or less of a public concern?

In terms of the first test Mr Blunkett's proposals for big-ticket offences seem strangely inappropriate. 30 year or whole-life sentences for terrorists, police-murderers and child-killers will not reduce the level of crime and may actually increase it. Take terrorists. The trend in international terrorism towards suicide missions makes any sort of sentencing policy in this area a nonsense. The outbreak of peace in Northern Ireland and the prisoner releases that have followed indicate how their avowedly political nature can change the perception of these crimes.

Police-murder, like all murder, is rarely a repeat offence. Nor is it common. It tends to occur when resisting arrest and to that extent is unpremeditated. Locking up murderers who are not going to murder again will not of itself reduce the murder rate. What about deterrence for would-be murderers? If there were no serious consequences the murder rate would doubtless increase. But do murderers really calculate the length of their sentence when considering their crime? Will 30 years deter when 15 does not? The evidence of the United States, where the death penalty is common, suggests otherwise.

Then there are the serial murderers, child-killers and rapists. Taking these people out of circulation for as long as they remain a danger does reduce the crime rate for these crimes. But these are abnormal people whose cases require individual attention. They are not easy to deter. Mandatory whole-life or 30 year sentences will not of itself reduce the level of this crime or will do so only marginally. Meanwhile people are locked up at huge expense for no serious purpose. Was Myra Hyndley a danger to society in her latter years?

How might Mr Blunkett's sentencing proposals actually increase the level of crime? Some argue that the risk of a "no hope" sentence for a murder he has already committed can encourage a criminal to commit a further murder to evade arrest. That may be so, but really the arguement comes down to money. Criminal justice, like most things in government, is a pot of money trying to achieve certain ends. Prison is hugely expensive. More prison costs more money and this is money that is then not available for initiatives that might really cut the level of crime. It's as complicated as that.

So is cutting the amount of crime really the political objective? Politicians get frustrated when crime levels fall and people seem not to notice. It begins to look as if the fear of crime is endemic and unrelated to the actual level of crime. There are two separate phenomena at play here. First is the "tabloid frenzy" that keeps things like crime and political asylum in the headlines because they excite the passions. The passion is the important thing and the facts are not allowed to intrude. Second is the health service phenomenon that dictates that however good things are, people always want more. When things get better they only see what is still bad.

These two phenomena combine to make perception, not facts, important to politicians. If there is really no connection between crime levels and the perception of it, perhaps there is political logic in making perception rather than reality the test of whether a policy is working. In that case, crowd-pleasing initiatives on sentencing would have a legitimate place.

The danger with this approach is the legacy of long term problems that it gifts to the future. When policy and real outcome become dissociated to the extent that the policy is not addressed at solving real problems, the problems don't get solved, they get worse. People will notice that, and then the warm glow of positive perception will rapidly turn cold.