Rhys JonesLabour came to power in 1997 promising to tackle both crime and its causes. Since then violent crime has doubled - and last week Rhys Jones became the 18th young person this year to be shot or stabbed to death. Alasdair Palmer and Julie Henry investigate why the Government has failed, and what needs to be done to make the streets of Britain safer
'I go to his room. There is his school uniform that we bought for secondary school. He should have been starting in September. His pens and pencils are there, unopened.
His calculator is there, unopened." Stephen Jones's words after his 11-year-old son, Rhys, was shot walking back from football practice eloquently conjure what he rightly described as every parent's worst nightmare.
His son's killer was a boy riding a BMX bicycle: witnesses say the murderer was not much older than his victim. Rhys Jones was the eighth young person to die after being shot this year.
Several of those killings seem to have been the result of shots fired by other children, or by people too young to be considered adults in the eyes of the law. In total, 18 young people have been shot or stabbed to death so far in 2007.
Rhys's murder came in the middle of a week which had begun with Frances Lawrence registering her disgust at the fact that Learco Chindamo, the man who, as a 15-year-old, murdered her husband by sticking a knife into his chest as he tried to protect another schoolboy, had won his appeal not to be deported back to Italy, the country of his birth, on his imminent release from prison.
Twelve years ago, when Chindamo stabbed Mr Lawrence to death, the case became part of the political battle between the Conservative Government and Tony Blair's New Labour Opposition.
Mr Blair was trying to convince the electorate that his party was "tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime", and not the soft touch that it had traditionally been assumed to be.
Mr Blair and Jack Straw, then shadow home secretary, insisted that Labour would put "more bobbies on the beat": they would cut police bureaucracy so that officers could get out on the streets more. "We should relieve unnecessary burdens on our police, to allow them to be out more on the beat in local communities," insisted Mr Blair.
But, above all, he would tackle the causes of crime: the breakdown of the family, the "fracturing of society", the loss of moral purpose and vision.
"Look at the wreckage of our broken society," he said in 1995. "Drugs, violence, youngsters hanging around street corners with nothing to do. We have to have the courage to build a new civic society, where everyone has a stake and everyone plays a part."
Sound familiar? David Cameron, leader of the Conservatives, has been saying almost exactly the same things in response to Rhys Jones's murder. "We'll never beat the criminal and secure our streets unless we free the police from the paperwork, red tape and targets that have made them into form writers rather than crime fighters," Mr Cameron said in a speech last Friday - one in which he also emphasised the importance of "strengthening families" and ending "a culture that undermines families and reinforces family and social breakdown". He stressed that parents have to take responsibility for their children.
"Parents have a responsibility to know where their children are and what they are doing." That last quotation, however, isn't from David Cameron's speech last Friday. It's from a speech Tony Blair gave in 1996.
The Conservatives today make the same attack on Labour's inability to control violent crime as Labour made on John Major's administration. The statistics demonstrate the present Government's vulnerability to it.
While ministers like to boast of a "40 per cent reduction in violent crime" - Jack Straw, now Minister for Justice, made that claim last week - the Home Office's figures tell a different story.
Over the past 10 years violent crime has doubled, up from 60,000 offences in 1998-99 to more than 120,000 in 2005-2006.
Homicides are up on 1997, though down from a peak in 2002-3 (largely because in that year, all of Harold Shipman's more than 200 murders were added to the tally).
Rape is up, as are other sexual offences. There are 15,000 more offences of "violent disorder" each year than there were a decade ago; 10,000 more offences involving possession of weapons were recorded in 2006 than in 1998. Assault is up, as is robbery. The only crime that has gone down significantly is burglary.
"You can use crime statistics to 'prove' just about anything you want about crime," says Ken Pease, Professor of Crime Science at University College London and Loughborough University.
"The overall trend seems to me to be certainly up, but you will find statisticians who will question that claim.
"My view is that the overall trend is less important than the fact of nasty things happening on the streets. And as the events of last week demonstrate, some of the things which happen on our streets today are extremely nasty."
Over the past decade, Labour has passed dozens of laws with a stated aim of curbing violence and disorder on the streets. The law permitting child curfews was one of the first.
Jack Straw, when he was Home Secretary after Labour was elected in 1997, introduced it.
The idea was to ban particularly rowdy or threatening children from being out on the streets between 6pm and 6am. "But they were just a big con," says Norman Brennan, a serving police officer who is director of the Victims of Crime Trust.
"They were introduced with this big fanfare, as if they would be the panacea for street crime. And how many have actually been implemented? None. Not one.
"And now, a decade later, you have Jacqui Smith, the present Home Secretary, saying she will introduce 'parenting orders' which make parents liable if their kids fail to behave acceptably. I have no confidence that parenting orders will be implemented effectively, or indeed at all."
The Government has already introduced anti-social behaviour orders, or asbos, to stop children from behaving badly. "Their success has been very limited," says Mr Brennan, "if they have been effective at all. The trouble is, there just aren't any effective sanctions for breaching them. So they are breached all the time - more than half of those who get an asbo just ignore it. No consequences follow, except perhaps they end up being more respected by their criminal peers."
Mr Brennan is particularly scathing about Labour's attempt to combat knife and gun crime.
"None of the new legislation they have introduced has made any difference at all. It's just been window-dressing. There were already heavy penalties on the statute books for going armed for the purpose of committing crime - you can get a life sentence - but they are just not enforced, and youngsters know it.
"They know they don't risk any punishment from the cops for carrying a knife or even a gun. So they do."
Back in 1997, Labour made a lot of promises about "tackling the causes of crime". Both Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, who was then poised to take over as Chancellor of the Exchequer, identified educational failure as a major reason why young people started offending.
In spite of the New Deal, and Labour's educational reforms, the number of neets has gone up from 10 per cent of 16-to-19-year-olds to 11 per cent. There are now more than 1.2 million people aged between 16 and 24 who are doing nothing to contribute to their own welfare, let alone anyone else's.
In 1997, Gordon Brown attacked the "scandal" of "wasting young people's talents". That scandal has intensified.
In 1997, Labour hoped that its "citizenship lessons" in all schools might increase young people's sense of responsibility.
"New primary school courses on good citizenship" were recommended by Frances Lawrence when, in October 1996, a year after her husband's murder, she published a "manifesto" for reducing crime and disorder.
The idea was enthusiastically endorsed by New Labour. In 2002 lessons in citizenship became a compulsory part of the National Curriculum. As yet, they appear to have had no impact.
Ofsted inspectors complain they are taught badly. Teachers complain of being overloaded with new compulsory courses. Children complain that citizenship lessons are boring and a waste of time. They certainly do not seem to have generated a renewed sense of civic responsibility.
"The problem with government attempts to tackle the big social causes of crime," says Prof Pease, "is that government is just not very good at changing the social situations which breed crime - even supposing officials know what those situations are."
More effective than trying to tackle the "social causes of crime" is for the state to deter criminal behaviour by increasing its costs. Sending convicted criminals to prison for longer can have that result: a significant portion of the reduction in burglary is down to the fact that Labour has largely followed the policy of longer sentences introduced by Michael Howard when he was Conservative Home Secretary in the 1990s.
"The judges have done what they can to frustrate that policy," says David Fraser, a former probation officer and author of A Nation Fit for Criminals, a study of penal policy in Britain.
"And Labour have frustrated it themselves because, for years, Gordon Brown would not release the funds for the prison building programme necessary to accommodate the additional prisoners that longer sentences required.
"That is why they have had to introduce a series of early-release schemes and alternatives to prison such as community sentences like tagging. Community sentences don't work - they just leave criminals free to commit crimes in the community - but when the Government won't build prisons, they have no alternative."
All the same, the prison population is at a record high. And Prime Minister Brown has finally announced that he will fund the building of more prisons.
The increase in the number of criminals being sent to prison does not, however, seem to have done much to deter youngsters from carrying knives and guns, and using them on each other. "That is because so few young criminals actually get sent to prison," explains Mr Fraser. "The courts and the probation service still use every possible excuse to avoid imposing a custodial sentence."
One example would be Peter Williams, the 18-year-old who was involved in the murder of Marian Bates as he robbed her jewellery shop near Nottingham in 2003.
Williams had committed dozens of crimes - he had convictions for theft, sexual assault and burglary - before he was placed on the "intensive surveillance and supervision programme".
Unfortunately, those supposedly supervising him failed to do so. They didn't know where he was, and didn't seem to care. It was while he was serving his "community sentence" that he murdered Marian Bates.
Yet a combination of effective policing and very tough sanctions can reduce violent youth crime. In the early 1990s, Boston, Massachusetts, experienced a terrifying upsurge in street shootings by gangs.
Many of the gang members were little more than children; few were legal adults. Between 1991 and 1995, the city's average number of "youth homicides" was more than 40 a year.
The Boston Gun Project, begun by David Kennedy and his colleagues at Harvard, reduced the number of killings by more than 60 per cent. It involved recruiting the probation service, the courts, and the police.
The researchers identified who gang members were and where they lived. The police and probation services - and at least 25 per cent of those who committed murder were on probation when they did it - targeted them. Aggressive and determined policing ensured not just that those who committed murder were tracked down and prosecuted but that anyone from a gang who carried a gun on the street was prosecuted.
Exemplary sentences were given - and publicised.
For example, a poster went up which said the following: "Problem: Freddie Cardoza. Gang member. Solution: Criminal Conviction. Arrested with one bullet. Sentence: 19 years, 7 months. No possibility of parole. Address: Otisville Federal Correction Institute, Maximum Security Facility, New York."
It sent a powerful message to young gang members that the community would not tolerate violence any more, and would punish it very severely indeed. For the first time, youngsters were more frightened of the law than of each other. Dramatic falls in gun crime followed.
"My simplest and most profound message," says Professor Kennedy, now director of the Centre for Crime Prevention and Control at Columbia University in New York, "is that we know, today, how to address this problem: in a way that saves lives, reduces incarceration, strengthens communities, bridges racial divides, and improves the lives of offenders and ex-offenders."
He insists that the critical step is that the community finds "its moral compass", and has the courage and commitment to act on the conviction that gang violence is wrong, "no matter what", and will not be tolerated.
The attitude to gangs, guns and violence has to be: "We're not going to leave this until it stops." That threat has to be carried through if it is to be credible. Half-measures do not, and cannot, work.
Do we in Britain have the courage and commitment to implement policies on that model? There appears to be popular support for whatever action would be effective.
But unlike in the US, where police chiefs and often judges are elected, the forces of law and order in Britain are not accountable to any electorate, which makes it difficult for popular concern to change penal policy.
It would also be much more difficult to achieve "exemplary sentences", such as that handed to the unfortunate Freddie Cardoza, in this country, due to the Human Rights Act.
But even much shorter sentences, properly enforced, would have significant effect. The trouble, at the moment, is that juvenile offenders have no reason to be more frightened of the law than they are of rival gangs - and so they carry knives and guns, and use them.
The enforcement of the law against juvenile criminals is patchy, weak or non-existent. It has little or no deterrent effect.
Unless that changes, gun and knife violence amongst youngsters will not decrease. And there will be more child murders.
We could stop the rot - by reinforcing the rule of law. But that would take a political will and courage that has been lacking for the past decade.
As Rhys Jones's mother, Melanie, said: "Our son was only 11. He was our baby. This should not happen. This should not be going on."
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/08/26/nrcrime126.xml&page=1
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