From: Charlie Stross (charlie@antipope.org)
Date: Sun Aug 04 2002 - 10:52:00 MDT
On Sat, Aug 03, 2002 at 10:53:14AM -0700, Lee Corbin wrote:
>
> > Your question is extremely unclear, but I _think_ what you're asking
> > is, "are released murderers more or less likely to commit an act of
> > murder than members of the general public". [Yes it was, thanks for
> > the much simpler rewording.] And the answer to that is
> > "less likely", at least under the regime in force in the UK.
>
> Do you think that all your statements here are invariant with
> respect to ideology? (You evidently have a way of getting me
> to phrase questions in the most obscure way possible.) In other
> words, would that summary be equally agreeable to Tories and
> Labor (or Liberal, whatever)?
Yes. That's because it's enforced by the Home Office, which is largely
apolitical and has its own agenda -- one of the side-effects of having a
civil service that isn't run by political appointees is that even if you
get, for example, a hang-'em-and-flog-'em Home Secretary or a pinko-soft-
on-crime Home Secretary (not that we've had one of the latter in the past
three or four decades, if ever), there's a huge amount of inertia in the
system. For example, the RIP Act -- an odious piece of legislation that
basically means All Your Private Key Are Belong To Us (and we can tap
your phone line at will) -- got passed into law under Jack Straw's watch
at the Home Office (Labour, control-freak tendency), but was hatched during
the Michael Howard period (Conservative, and rather extreme), and is still
being pursued under the Blunkett regime (Labour, less heavy-handed).
If enforcement is de-politicized, it's less prone to erratic glitches in
sentencing or policy. It's also (thankfully) not as prone to politicians
trying to grandstand by promising to be tougher on crime than their
predecessors. That _does_ happen, but it takes so many years for any
change of policy at the top to feed all the way through the system that
it's very hard for a single individual to drastically change the system,
for the better *or* for the worse.
-- Charlie
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