Lately this kind of talk has become unfashionable. But what should we make of events over the last few weeks in which the usual suspects - sensation-seeking tabloids, pontificating police officers and rent-a-lynch-mob Tory MPs - have lamented the apparently terminal decline of British society? Concocting a national crisis out of a murder, a school crushed under the weight of Conservative education reforms and some creative crime reporting by prison-junkies in the national press is easy if you know how.
For the assembly of saints sitting on Labour's front bench - Holy Tony, God-fearing Jack and Blessed David of the Home-School Contract - jumping on the bandwagon proved irresistible. 'This isn't a moral panic at all. This is for real. Something needs to be done.' So, in the time-honoured tradition of moral panics, comes the legislative response. The programme for the rotting remains of this Parliament is dominated by discipline - in schools, in prisons and in what's left of civil society.
The centrepiece is the Crime (Sentences) Bill - something they prepared earlier just in case a moral panic should come along. Published by the serial law-breaker Michael Howard on 25th October, this vicious piece of legislation has already been attacked by the Liberal Democrats' Alex Carlile, at least three former Tory Home Secretaries and a hit squad of senior judges, including the present Lord Chief Justice and both his immediate predecessors.
Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition, on the other hand, has chosen to do precisely nothing. Labour did not oppose the Bill on second reading. God-fearing Jack has muttered something about deploring the Government's legislative methods, but made no effort to dissociate himself from Howard's punitive aims. Just the reverse in fact. The day after the Bill's publication, he was widely quoted claiming credit for its 'flexibility' and the creative use of a 'discount' on sentences to encourage more people to plead guilty.
The main provisions of the Bill are well known: mandatory minimum prison sentences for people convicted of a second serious sexual or violent offence, three-time domestic burglars and 'hard' drug traffickers; the abolition of the existing system of early release; and extended powers to supervise convicted sex offenders 'in the community'. All in all, a ringing endorsement for American-style 'three strikes and you're out' populism.
So far, controversy over the proposals has centred on the squeals of anguish emitting from judges who think they will be prevented from 'doing justice' and so-called Tory grandees like Douglas Hurd and Kenneth Baker who claim that the pressure of keeping thousands more people under lock and key will lead to the disintegration of the prison system. There is something to be said for both arguments, although Hurd and Baker are hardly civil libertarians and judicial discretion in sentencing has usually meant giving a free rein to the refined and carefully modulated racism and sexism of unrepresentative judges and JPs brought up to keep the lower orders in their place.
But the case against the Bill is more fundamental than this. It refutes not just this latest piece of political opportunism by Howard, Straw and all the moral entrepreneurs who believe that the lash, the rope and the cell are the only cures for society's ills, but a whole tradition of thinking on criminal justice based on the assumption that more means better. As social anxiety deepens and crime rises it is taken for granted that more police, tougher policing methods, more prisons and harsher sentences are the answer.
But they aren't. John Major has promised to recruit 5,000 more police officers.Yet we know that the chances of them having any significant impact on levels of crime are virtually non-existent. Years of research have failed, in the words of one leading American observer, 'to show that the number of police, the amount of money spent on police, or the methods police use [have] any effect on crime'.
Much the same can be said of Michael Howard's belief that 'prison works'. The US - ever the favoured source of bright ideas for intellectually challenged British politicians on the make - is a case in point. Since 1970, the population of the USA's federal and state prison systems, excluding local jails and special institutions for juveniles, has more than quintupled from just under 200,000 to today's figure of over 1.1 million. To cope with this explosion in rates of incarceration, the state of Michigan was opening a new prison every nine weeks in 1989.
The results of this experiment in mass incarceration have been disappointing. In Louisiana, the proportion of the population in custody at any one time was five times higher in the mid 1990s than in the early 1970s. Meanwhile, the homicide rate in the state's main conurbation, New Orleans, rose by 300%. The city slashed education funding to build still more prisons even as the body count continued to rise.
Far from proving that 'prison works', and justifying the vast sums of money spent on creating the land of the free's very own gulag archipelago, the American experience shows that any slight reduction in violent crime has been achieved only at an incalculable cost in human misery and wasted opportunity.
As usual, African Americans and other minorities have born the brunt of the assault. One recent study estimates that, on any given day, almost a third of all young black men are under the supervision of the criminal justice system, many of them, inevitably, in prison.
So why do Howard and Straw - the Tweedle-Dum and Tweedle-Dee of law 'n' order politics - seem to believe that locking more people up and keeping them locked up for longer is the answer to their prayers? A hard-bitten cynic would say that Howard is pandering to the atavistic tendencies of the Tory faithful. Anyone with a similarly jaded political palate might even go so far as to suggest that God-fearing Jack might be after a few votes in middle England where, as Mandelson's focus groups probably tell him, the clank of keys and slamming of doors is music to the ears of the Lloyd Webber listening classes.
But let's not give way to cynicism for once. Let's suppose that these two peerless public servants really do have the interests of the British people at heart. Let's suppose that they genuinely believe that mandatory minimum sentences and an end to early release will cut crime and protect the public. How do they see it happening, and how can they justify the measures contained in the new Crime Bill?
Sadly, neither Howard nor Straw has taken the trouble to explain exactly how incarcerating - on the Home Office's own figures - 11,000 more people over the next twelve years at an annual cost of over £400 million is going to affect levels of crime and public safety. They seem to think that 'prison works' because if criminals are inside doing time they aren't outside committing crime.
Only a fool would deny that locking up large numbers of people, many of whom have committed serious offences, is likely to have some effect on crime rates. But the American experience suggests that it will be minimal, and that other areas of social policy - education, training, economic development, and so on - will be starved of resources to fund the most anti-social policy of all - a policy of mass imprisonment.
The real cynicism here is the cynicism of politicians who offer bogus solutions to the problems of crime and public protection as an alternative to thinking more deeply and creatively about why crime occurs and who needs to be protected against it. Instead of wasting money on what prison governors have condemned as 'human warehouses' calculated to brutalise all those who pass through them, wouldn't it be better to look again at what we know about crime and its place in the social fabric of a patriarchal de-industrialising society?
We know, for example, that men are most likely to commit crime. Not single or working mothers or the other women targeted by the moralising disciples of 'family values', but men. What does this say about masculinity in a patriarchal society?
We also know that people who come to the attention of the police and risk ending up, via the courts, in the prison system tend to be economically and socially marginalised - poor, unskilled, badly educated and dependent on drugs or alcohol.
Prison offers them nothing: only further marginalisation. What does this say about growing inequality in a de-industrialising society where prisons are affordable, but childcare, schools, hospitals and social security benefits are not?
We also know that the people most likely to become the victims of crime - often repeatedly - are similarly disadvantaged. Black people and women have to live with the additional threat of racist victimisation and male violence. What does this say about priorities for extending public protection to those unable to buy security in the new free market for personal safety?
Prisons solve nothing. Incarcerating more people in the heat of a moral panic is an expensive exercise in futility. Labour should have nothing to do with it. If there is a crisis out there, pious moralising to the accompaniment of sliding bolts and turning keys won't resolve it. Challenging exhausted patriarchal values and ending the rampant injustices of a clapped-out capitalism just might.
