Courts
Well Your Worships and Your Honours, what are you thinking of?
When the Police actually get someone to court and you find them guilty - you actually have a chance to make a difference to the lives of ordinary people by dishing out a punishment that actually fits the crime - a deterrent to the criminal - some justice for the victim. But you don't though, do you?
I watched a BBC documentary about the binge drinking in three towns in the UK over Christmas. The behaviour was atrocious, drunken brawling, the police attacked - and that was just by the young women! Several very violent drunken people were arrested and due to the backlog at custody, several policemen were tied up most of the night sitting in the yard with these thugs while waiting to be processed. At the end of the program, the BBC went through what punishments had been dished out by Your Worships. Three months imprisonment I thought would be about right for the one that tried to punch the policeman. No. Wrong again. £150 fine was the highest and £50 was more common! What a waste of time. No deterrent value whatsoever. The perpetrators must have walked away laughing at you and our society!
Is this all your fault though? According to Peter Hitchens in The Mail, the Sentencing Advisory Panel has much to do with it. Two of their latest dictats state that:
1) 'muggers should be allowed to use minimum violence without going to jail.'
2) 'burglars that steal to feed a drug habit will not go to jail'
Call me Mr Cynical but I expect the SAP is overflowing with the PC Brigade. The Lord Chief Justice Lord Woolf, who heads the Sentencing Guidelines Council, seems determined to keep thugs out of jail as well. He commented "There are going to be occasions, even in offences which involve violence, where it's going to be appropriate not to use a custodial sentence." He is convinced that jail sentences of one year or less do little to reduce crime (at least it stops them reoffending for that year - Ed) and is keen on community alternatives. He says that courts must not respond to public clamour for higher sentences and that politicians comments were often unhelpful. What the Lord Chief Justice seems to forget is that it is Parliament makes the laws and he is just paid to implement them in a fair and proper manner!
But is it not a bit more sinister and goes deeper than that? What about the selection of Magistrates - is not the Advisory Council that recommends appointments of Magistrates to the Lord Chancellor just a bit PC as well? Mike Dickens on Talk Sport said that one of his friends was being interviewed with a view to becoming a Magistrate. They asked him whether he thought that burglars should go to prison. When he replied that he did - end of interview - end of story! (Check that one out with Mike Dickens, not me!)
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