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22 How. J. Penology & Crime Prevention 1 (1983)

handle is hein.journals/hjcj22 and id is 1 raw text is: The Howard Journal Volume XXII 1983. pp. 1-7 League Leader (A column of individual comments on current issues contributed by the Director of the Howard League, by members of the Council of the League, or by the Editors of the Howard Journal.) Criminal Justice in the 1980s' By Rt. Hon. ROY HATTERSLEY, M.P. The Home Office published its annual digest of criminal statistics for England and Wales at the end of October 1982. The figures showed that in 1981 almost three million notifiable offences were committed - a 10% increase on the previous year and the highest figure ever recorded since such statistics were first published. Six weeks previously a similar digest of prison statistics was published. It showed that the prison population exceeded 44,000, having doubled during the last 30 years and more than quadrupled since 1930, when the figure first exceeded 10,000. Incredibly those two sets of statistics have largely been discussed as if they were separate and independent phenomena, joined only by the equal opportunity they provided for criticism of the Home Secretary. But not even the criticism has been complementary. Some critics have argued that it is the atmosphere of general leniency that has caused the escalating levels of crime. Others have simply expressed the growing feeling of revulsion at both the number of men and women who serve custodial sentences and the conditions in which many of those sentences are served. Remarkably few of the critics have tried to draw from the two sets of figures any conclusions about either the organisa- tion of society or the philosophy which guides and governs national policy on crime and punishment. There are of course one or two exceptions. Mrs Elaine Kellett- Bowman, an M.P. in both Strasbourg and Westminster, had this to say during the debate on Her Majesty's Prisons which the Opposition initiated on 2 December 1981: The criminal should cease attacking and robbing people so that there would be fewer criminals in prison. You may argued that the judgment lacks subtlety but you will concede that it demonstrates a degree of lateral thinking. The number of people who go to prison is, Mrs Kellett-Bowman has detected, related to the number of people who are convicted. Though we can applaud her analysis, her implied conclusion is less creditable. This double M.P. clearly believes that the Home Secretary's primary task is to apply policies of whatever severity is necessary to deter crime - thus clearing the streets and the prisons at a single stroke. Until he does that, the 1

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