Let's end this legislation by trial and error

Thursday June 10, 2010

The prison population in England and Wales is 85,000 and growing, thanks partly to a raft of new offences that seriously infringe on our civil liberties. Suzy Dean has had enough.

The growing regulation of every day activity has lead to the imprisonment of many individuals for petty crimes. Illiberal policy making is not without its consequences; there has been a growth in the UK’s prison population. Between 1995 and 2009, the prison population in England and Wales grew by 32,500 or 66 per cent.

Last week, Lord Woolfe, ex-chief justice, took issue with overcrowding in prisons. Woolfe argued in The Times that, “in such a severe economic crisis it is folly to have policies that make the prison population substantially higher than is necessary.” What was striking about this assault was that overcrowding informed Woolfe’s decision to challenge illiberal policies, rather than anything to do with the importance of safeguarding individual and social freedoms.

State budget has traditionally been allocated to services the governing party – and by mandate society – deem to be important or necessary. In wake of the recession Cameron’s decision to cut advertising budgets will surely be followed by many less popular cuts to the NHS and education. It is not unthinkable that cuts will be made to the prison service.

In practical terms, it’s great if government savings are made in the prison service by getting rid of legislation which should never have been there and tries to do pointless things like manage our drinking habits. But to make these cuts on the basis of economics rather than any real political discussion about our freedom bypasses the substance that would make those changes meaningful. Do we really think that drinking in the street or hanging around street corners justifies locking people up?

Growing

At present the prison population is 85,000 and growing, this is largely due to the increase in new offences. The single most notable legacy of the Labour Party during their thirteen years of government was undoubtedly the fact that they managed to introduce over 4,300 new offences – an average of a new crime a day. The Labour government’s approach was legislation by trial and error so laws were introduced then examined to see if they were well received by the public. The debate about whether certain activities were worthy of criminalising in the first place was often missed out.

Many of these laws seriously infringe our freedom. The police now have powers to disperse groups of people under anti-social behaviour laws. Since summer 2007 the government and some 700 agencies have had access to all landline and mobile phone records and the Terrorism Act of 2000 have given the police the power to stop and search anybody inside a designated area, even if there is no suspicion of wrongdoing.

Public-order laws have been used to curtail free expression (remember the Bollocks to Blair t-shirt scandal?) and the 2006 Race and Religious Hatred Act has more or less put an end to any serious argument about the place of religion in society. There have been many more. Not to mention the additional tiers of police ‘support’,as if Community Officers weren’t irritating enough. These ‘accredited persons’ have sub-police powers and do things like fine people for dropping their fag butt.

Acceptable

The fact that it has become so easy – and indeed acceptable- for people to be have their freedom taken away from them for such petty crimes tells us two things. Firstly that freedom is not valued as highly by politicians and judges, who take it away at a whim and hope it proves that they are ‘tough on crime’ . Secondly, the fact that politicians can do this so easily suggests that publically we are not prepared to defend our freedom.

We should be thinking about reducing the number of criminal acts which seriously infringe upon our liberties because we value our freedom, not just because we want to save a few quid. The removal of a man’s freedom is the highest form of punishment that society can give; when we remove a man’s freedom we remove his ability to make choices. If actions are not worthy of taking a man’s freedom then they shouldn’t be legislated against. It is working out what is and isn’t serious enough that we need to decide upon socially.

Lots of us are fed up of legislation that makes illegal what we consider to be normal behaviour; the freedom to have a drink in the park or indeed walk in the park without being treated like a paedophile. The recession and consequent discussion around where to make cuts has created the opportunity for us to challenge these. Rather than let a discussion simply around economics take place we should get stuck in and let each other as well as the government know what we think.

Suzy Dean is a writer and journalist and co-founder of To The Point Manifesto