Mr Narey Should Give a Proper Response on Capital Punishment . Then we can discuss DNA

Mr Narey tells me that he didn’t think it necessary to respond to my previous posting on the death penalty - much of which was a detailed rebuttal of, and interrogation of his first article.  he says he didn't think there was 'much left' in the capital punishment debate.That’s why he’s moved straight on to DNA.

I disagree.  I think there's a lot left. I am happy to discuss compulsory DNA registration, and do so below. But first I will re-post here the central part of my riposte to him, urging him to reply to what I said. I am, frankly, amazed that he doesn't think there's anything to deal with here. If he concedes my points, then well and good. Otherwise, I'd like to continue the argument. If he won't,  I'll assume he's waving a white flag of surrender.

‘What one needs to establish are common measures of the sort of crimes that a death penalty might be expected to deter. I would define these as murders, or acts of extreme violence, undertaken by calculating people either in pursuit of another crime, or to silence witnesses, or to intimidate opponents. These might feature in the crime figures as murders, manslaughters, attempted murders or serious wounding. I’d add those done under the influence of drink or drugs, because I think a fear of the gallows might deter people from deliberately destroying their own inhibitions by voluntarily-ingested chemicals. Nicholas Ingram, the British-born murderer whose execution I witnessed, was said to have been under the influence of drink and/or drugs at the time he committed his crime. The law quite rightly did not see that as an excuse. If it did, the consequences would be large – and in my view bad.
 
In the same spirit, I would add the habitual carrying of lethal weapons, be they guns or knives, by criminals as a crime that could be deterred by an effective death penalty. Other sorts of murderous violence are probably so irrational that deterrence wouldn’t influence them.
 
So my first direct question to Mr Narey is ‘Does he accept the above description of crimes which might reasonably be deterred, if a death penalty deterred?’ If not, what would he add or subtract? Mr Narey says :’Punishment offers very little by the way of deterrence. I made no apology for treating those we incarcerate with decency and dignity. It’s about imposing our values, not succumbing to the values of those who harm and steal from others.’
 
*** PH : I reply: ‘ In what way is treating prisoners austerely , compelling them to work hard, and making their conditions so disagreeable that they will not wish to return to prison ‘succumbing to the values of those who harm and steal from others’?
Mr Narey then says : ‘But there would have been an interesting moral challenge to my determination to make prisons more decent places if the various experiments in the last thirty years with austere and physically demanding regimes had deterred offending. But they didn’t.’’

**PH ‘I am most interested in this statement. What were these experiments? Preferably without referring us to inaccessible journals written in Martian, can he tell us where and when they took place and for how long, what the controls were against which they were tested, and what happened? ‘
 
One can, by contrast examine the state of crime in this country when the prisons of England were in general places of austerity, discipline and hard work. Crime was much lower (see my book ‘A Brief History of Crime’) and so was the prison population.
 
Mr Narey says : ‘Offenders, overwhelmingly, don’t believe they will get caught. That is what we need to change. It can be done. The simplest example of that is the way that the habit of drinking and driving, something which countless law abiding individuals indulged in, was changed by the spectre of the breathalyser. It was never the case that there was a significant chance of being stopped on the way home from the pub. But individuals believed there was and this particular type of criminality diminished remarkably.’
 
**PH: ‘ My recollection of the introduction of the breathalyser is that the police made very great use of it at the start, and that many people were indeed caught, most people knew someone who had been, and that the belief in the likelihood of being caught was justified. What's more the penalties wer eimpsoed strictly. Comapre and contrast the feeble enforcement of the law agaisnt using a handheld phone while driving.

Further, is it the case that thieves don’t think they will get *caught*? Or is it the case that they know that even if they are caught, nothing much will happen to them? Mr Narey knows full well that very few people in this country go to prison until they have committed at least a dozen offences, many of which will have been dealt with by ‘cautions’ or various other empty gestures. The fundamental falsehood advanced by the modern Criminal Justice industry is the claim that people become habitual criminals while in prison. No, they become habitual criminals long before they arrive there.
 
He also knows, unless he’s very unobservant, that the Police and the CPS can’t be bothered with spending manpower on offences which are not prosecuted, or which, when prosecuted, result in trivial sentences. The general abandonment of, and devaluation of punishment which accompanied abolition of the death penalty has been followed by a large increase in crime, and a large decrease in penalties. Yet the prisons are bursting.
 
This can only be explained by an increase in the numbers of people ready to risk crimes. This can partly be explained by a failure of deterrence, partly by the general moral decay we are suffering(though that could itself be partly the result of the failure of deterrence) . Mr Narey’s DNA proposals are an interesting confirmation of my view that a society that refuses to punish wrongdoing, and excuses it as a social disease, will become a tyranny of surveillance, in which we are all presumed to be potential criminals and must be subject to intense state supervision for our own good.
 
 In the end, Mr Narey’s argument could also be a case for each of us having a barcode permanently tattooed on our foreheads, so as to make identification easier. In a free society, you may keep the law, and you will never hear from the state at all, which is your servant and your ally in the maintenance of peace and order. Break it, and you are punished hard.
 
In Mr Narey’s society, crime is a disease which anyone may catch at any time from economic conditions, bad housing, child abuse, ‘addiction’ (or whatever other excuse is currently fashionable). Therefore it is wise to assume that all are potential offenders, and to have our fillings, lymph glands, blood groups, DNA, hair follicles and eye colour on file in case they offend.

Well, here I must be subjective. If this idea doesn’t make your blood boil, then in my view there is just something fundamentally wrong with you, and you have no respect or gratitude for our ancestors who squeezed Magna Carta out of King John, forced the abolition of Star Chamber and High Commission, opposed Ship Money, achieved the Petition of Right, established Habeas Corpus, safeguarded jury trial and the presumption of innocence, ended the oppressive use of criminal libel and – perhaps above all – defeated James II’s attempts to make us into a continental despotism and secured the 1689 Bill of Rights. These are the things that make us Englishmen, and which distinguish the English system of liberty from the rest of the world.’
 

 

As for compulsory DNA registration,  It is a high price, in return for not all that much. Mr Narey’s emotive cases are of course examples, above all,  of the failure of the justice system to deter wickedness of the sort he describes. DNA evidence did not prevent these killings.

It is a problem of criminal justice professionals that they see the penal system as an end in itself. But the first purpose of a police and penal system is not to punish. Punishment rarely does any good to the criminal, and does not bring back what the victim, or the victim’s family, have lost. It is there to deter potential criminals from committing crimes.

Fundamentally, like its cousin the Identity Card,  DNA registration changes the nature of the relation between the state and the subject in a way deeply hostile to liberty. It abolishes the presumption of innocence, and demolishes the idea that we are all free men and women under the law, who can and must be assumed to be behaving lawfully unless an accusation can be proved against us before jury of our peers.  With these ideas gone, the overbearing, bullying behaviour common to police forces, and authority in general,  in the unfree world will become universal in this country.

Its miraculous efficacity  is over-rated, it being less accurate and reliable  than sometimes claimed, easily contaminated by professional criminals or incompetent police officers,  and – as one contributor rightly pointed out – it is no great threat to the wicked when it is combined with the other thing Mr Narey supports - a feeble penal system which prosecutes a small minority of crimes and is unwilling to visit serious punishments on those it convicts. It can and (to my knowledge) does promote a certain laziness in the police, who will pursue individuals whose DNA appears to turn up at crime scenes, in defiance of other evidence or of strong circumstantial reasons why the person involved could not possibly be the culprit ( see an instance in my Channel Four film on this subject).