Is one violent assault a tragedy, but forty just a statistic?
Civitas, 15 July 2010
Andrew Bridges, Chief Inspector of Probation, made quite a splash on Monday when he suggested that the public should bite the bullet (almost literally in some cases) and let criminals convicted of violent offences out of prison early.
He argued in a foreword to the Inspectorate’s annual report, that a rational weighting of the costs and benefits of continued imprisonment shows it makes more sense to release a number of potentially violent criminals back into society under supervision and accept a somewhat higher crime rate as a result. How does his argument stack up?
To illustrate his point, Bridges pulls together some statistics on some early release and supervision schemes. He first considers relatively less serious offenders, 80,000 of whom were eligible to be released from prison under license around 2 weeks before the official end of their sentence between 2007 and the first half of this year. He worked out that this scheme saved around £48 million over the course of a year, and estimated that 600 or so additional offences were committed as a result of the scheme (that is, offences committed by freed prisoners during their two week period of early release). He concluded that it cost around £80,000 to prevent each additional crime.
His second example is rather more eye-catching. He suggests that offenders incarcerated for an indeterminate period under Imprisonment for Public Protection (IPP), one kind of life sentence, should be put under an enhanced supervision programme in the community having served their minimum sentence, saving around £32,000 per convict per year. Based on figures from high-risk offenders supervised in a similar way, he estimated that, at most, 1 in 60 offenders would commit a serious crime per year. This means that if 2400 of these serious offenders were released under supervision as he suggested as one possible policy option, ‘only’ 40 extra serious crimes would be committed each year. Every serious crime prevented by keeping people imprisoned under IPP, he suggested, cost £2 million pounds.
This is an ingenious argument but it misses out a number of important costs. Bridges presents both his accounts as pessimistic estimates (on the upper bound of the likely increase in crime), but they miss out an important element: an awful lot of crime does not get reported and when it does, the perpetrator is not always found. The Home Office’s study on the Economics and Social Costs of Crime adds, for example, a multiplier of 7.7 for Common Assault and 4.3 for criminal damage. Bridges, by contrast, relies on alleged offences for his figures. So what looks like a few hundred additional offences on Bridges’ desk could turn out to be a miniature crime wave of several thousand on the streets. There are too many variables to offer an alternative estimate; we would need to know more about the offences being committed, and how many of them are committed by a hard core of repeat offenders (which might well be those released prematurely from prison).
As for more serious offenders, they only count as recidivists on Bridges’ assumptions if they are suspected of a ‘homicide or attempted homicide, rape or attempted rape and other serious violent or sexual offences with a maximum penalty of 14 years’ imprisonment or more’ . Relatively serious assaults might not be accounted for at all, nor any of the less serious offences that these offenders might commit while under supervision. Rape and other sexual offences are also markedly under-reported, which means letting convicted rapists out when a court has already given a life sentence could permit rather more violent sexual attacks than Bridges permits in his ‘pessimistic’ calculations. This would not be a policy that was very compatible with tackling violence against women. In addition, I am not sure how secure Bridges’ assumption is that people emerging from these life sentences are generally going to be as controllable as the ‘high-risk’ group already managed by the probation service.
More generally, we might ask how applicable a cost-benefit analysis really is to questions of life, death and serious injury. The Ford motor company famously decided not to recall a model that it knew to have design flaw on the basis that it would be cheaper to pay some out of court settlements for some avoidable deaths than to do a full recall of the car. It was punished when this cold decision was discovered (it had to pay out compensation AND was forced to do a recall). The criminal justice system is meant to be providing a service to the public too: safe communities for law-abiding people to live in. If it cuts costs in ways which make that communal environment toxic, it will lead to the avoidable deaths and injuries of people it is meant to be protecting, betraying a lack of respect for individual victims of crimes. At times, it seems like the Alphabet soup of quangos that make up the criminal justice system consider offenders to be more important ‘clients’ than ordinary citizens.