Michael Howard - 11 Reasons Not to Vote for Him - Reason 5

5) ITS COMMON SENSE. IT’S HOW I WILL CUT CRIME.

Wrong – Fatuous and condescending: If it’s common-sense, then how come 50% of all prisoners released re-offend within 2 years and 36% commit crimes serious enough to be returned to prison? That’s “Prison Working” for you. Amongst our youth the fugure's are even grimmer. 70% of those in the 18-20 year old bracket were convicted of another crime within two years, 47% of them actually back in prison on another sentence. Now, I’ve been doing some maths……….That means, if every year let’s say 5,000 new people are sent to prison on top of the present overcrowded circumstances (there are 8,000 more prisoners being held in jails that the present number of prisons available can hold) and 2,500 are released from prison. Out of those 2,500 released prisoners around 450 of them are returned to prison the following year along with the 5,000 that are sent to prison, for more and more facile crimes that Howard wants to see us punished for (see below) that means the prison population is growing by 5,450 every year and, like compound interest, it’ll grow exponentially until we’re all in prison! Best get building now, Mr Howard.


As with the vast majority of politicians, Howard disregards all evidence that goes against his “grand plan”. When the then Director General of Prisons, Narey, said, "I've never seen my job as being about just locking people up. It's self-evident in terms of value for money that if we can get people off drugs, on to offending behaviour programmes and into education, then we're going to reduce crime." how did Howard respond? He gave us the socially irresponsible phrase, “We shall no longer judge the success of our system of justice by a fall in our prison population." (!) Surely a person in his position, supposedly with access to the best brains in the business could see the stupidity held in such a statement. The trick is to have a low prison population and a low crime rate, but that takes work, not knee-jerk, snip-snap media bursts of rhetoric and with his eye on the next years of power, Howard hasn’t got time for working at it. He wants the snappy answer, the headliner, the frightener; no depth, no colour, no betterment. Watch him over the next few weeks as he leaps from band-wagon to band-wagon; like a child in charge of the TV remote each new phase catching his attention for a flash statement and then on to the next………my friends, get really concerned when a politician tells you that what he’s doing to you he’s doing to you for your own good……and Howard will come up with allsorts of guff in order to win your vote. You want to know how he’ll cut crime?


1) Howard will hark back to his “American Experience” as he did in the 90’s and beyond when he spouted, “In short we need zero tolerance policing”, and we can see how well things are working out there in the good ol' U.S., can’t we? He applauded Giuliani for his stance in New York and stated the need for us, in the U.K. to “……demonstrate that there is a line people cannot cross”. So where do they go, Mr Howard, those that do cross “that line” through the reasons stated in point 1 above? Under your regime, not in our backyard, that’s for certain; best keep these ravening hordes he keeps warning us about in the ghettos maybe? Howard’s certainly not prepared to furnish these people with anything so as they can better themselves….. apart from a prison cell that is.


2) He’ll repeat that nugget, “In many ways the police, our courts and the prison service are simply picking up the pieces of other people's failures”. Notice how he skilfully shifts the blame onto everybody else but himself and politicians like him .....other people, not government, just other people’s failures. (see the background to his treatment of Derek Lewis). He tells us, “Many people now believe that they are no longer wholly responsible for their actions”, and this coming from the shape-shifter of politics. Here’s a guy who uses Gilbert and Sullivan quotes to stick a crime and punishment bill together and has so badly misunderstand the meaning behind West-Side Story (stick with me, these howlers will follow later) telling us, “Like them” (THEM?) “I have had enough of the culture of political correctness - which is designed to blur the distinction between right and wrong”. No it’s not, you imbecile, it’s there to sharpen it, to protect the abused, the slandered, the under-valued, the minority from people like you who have a “one-size-fits-all” mentality.


3) He’ll tell us “My approach was simple” (he’s not wrong there) “to give the police the powers they needed to catch criminals; to give the courts the powers they needed to convict criminals; and to give our prisons the space to take persistent, serious and dangerous offenders out of circulation altogether.” And he failed in all three. Under his guidance police numbers fell, the prisons were overcrowded and he’s released at least one dangerous drug dealer (see later episodes……it’s a goody).


4) He’ll repeatedly and unashamedly fail to listen to those with real knowledge on the subject, like Lord Corbett, Chairman, All-Party Parliamentary Penal Affairs Group who said, “The prison system is failing the public, prisoners and those who work in prisons.” He'll disregard all attempts to tell him in plain English where the problems lie, like Lord Woolf did.

a) “The Woolf Report identified overcrowding as one of the most damaging features of prison life. The recommendation that a 'cap' on prison overcrowding should be introduced to prohibit any prison from holding more prisoners than its certified normal accommodation was rejected by the government on publication of the Woolf Report.”
Nb. Today, half of all prisons remain overcrowded, and of the 24 prisons built or re-opened since the Strangeways riot, 15 (62.5 per cent) are overcrowded.

b) The Woolf Report recommended that particular attention should be given to the problems experienced in remand prisons. Although the government said that new legislation would be introduced to establish a domestic legislative basis for the treatment of unconvicted prisoners, no progress has been made towards this objective. Remand prisons, such as Strangeways, continue to bear the brunt of severe overcrowding and decrepit conditions. Between April 1999 and February 2000 the average number of prisoners held two to a single cell remained consistently high in remand prisons. For example, there were 758 prisoners held two to a single cell in Birmingham, 337 in Brixton, 471 in Cardiff, 367 in Exeter, 613 in Leeds, 420 in Liverpool, 387 in Strangeways, 319 in Pentonville, 519 in Preston and 432 in Wandsworth.
The Woolf Report recommended that community prisons should be developed to ensure, amongst other things, that prisoners serve their sentences as close to their homes as possible. Today, the average distance male prisoners are kept from their homes is 50 miles and seven per cent are kept at least 150 miles from their homes.

c) The Woolf Report recommended that the amount of time prisoners spend occupied in purposeful activity should be increased. Yet, the average number of hours per week spent by prisoners on purposeful activity has increased by less than one hour since 1990.


5) Howard will continue to ignore research and common sense that states prison overcrowding - which occurs because courts send more people to prison for longer - squeezes out education and training and impedes efforts to offer a route to a more useful life and that, until there is a costed strategy to ensure those agencies concerned with housing, social care, training and education work together effectively with prisoners, the expensive failure of the "revolving door" for the majority will continue."


6) Howard’s arrogance will override knowledgeable statements from statesmen like the Rt. Hon Douglas Hurd, "The Strangeways riot and the Woolf Report woke the public up to the formidable problems of our prisons - for a year or two. Ten years on we must wake up the public again. If we neglect the conditions in which 65,000 of our fellow citizens are held, then we are preparing the way for future crime and more victims." And from the then Chief Inspector of Prisons, Sir Stephen Tumim who said: "It seems a great pity than following the favourable reception given by the government and the media to the Woolf Report, and in particular the White Paper which followed it, so little has been done by way of implementation. The systems of contracts, of accredited standards, of greater co-operation between different parts of the Criminal Justice System, of control of overcrowding, better links with the community and families, have all been praised by each Home Secretary, but never really acted upon.”

Jeeezzzeeee.....................what you see is what you'll get. Think it can't get any worse? Read on, my friend.