As Max Wind-Cowie sensibly said yesterday, the rioters are looting and rampaging because they refuse to accept policing. In any civilised society, there is a contract between citizens and the state, with an understanding on both sides of both rights and responsibilities.

As Phillip Blond sensibly said yesterday, these rioters have lapped up the idea of their rights (to an extraordinary degree – how is it a right to have brand new trainers or a giant telly?), but have rejected the notion that they have any responsibilities.

And as Hugo Rifkind sensibly said last night as well, this is when liberal principles really count. It is possible – in fact, I think it is imperative – to have a criminal justice system and an approach to policing which is both tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime, and which serves our wider society better than a mindless lock ‘em up, forget about them for a while, and release them to reoffend mentality.

Watching last night’s footage, I am all for the most aggressive policing we can achieve to deal with these riots. These criminals have utterly abandoned any sense of community, and clearly have little or no sense of responsibility to anyone but themselves. I do not think that there are any excuses for how they have been behaving.

At the same time, we need to understand why they are behaving like this. We do need renewal in society; people need to feel part of something bigger than themselves and that others are on their side.

This is somewhat trite, but that is exactly why the Big Society is important. We’re already seeing the great work of Riot Clean Up. Afterwards, we’ll be needing Society Clean Up as well.

Yet, as a recent Economist article demonstrates, it is conservativism, rather than liberalism, that is fast assuming the vanguard in sentencing and prison reform internationally. Indeed, it is the conservative, Republican-dominated states of Texas, Kentucky, Oklahoma and South Carolina that have successfully passed legislation to divert low-risk offenders towards rehabilitative programmes instead of custody, at no expense to political credibility or electoral standing. A recent Republican bill to mandate drug treatment instead of prison for non-violent offenders in Kentucky’s Senate, for example, was passed 38 votes to none.

The key to this nascent reforming zeal among conservatives is the unsustainable cost of incarceration. In an era of unprecedented budgetary constraints, the use of custody is viewed as an unaffordable response to low-risk offenders. However, the move towards community sentencing has delivered improved rehabilitation outcomes in addition to the predicted savings. In Texas, the investment of $240 million in alternatives to custody, in lieu of the $2 billion projected cost of new prison places, has seen recidivism rates fall by 7 per cent, from 31.9 per cent to 24.3 per cent, since 2004. Increasingly, it seems, budgetary impecunity is leading to legislative ingenuity in criminal justice, and with it improved value for money and outcomes for taxpayers.

The success of these initiatives demonstrates two things. Firstly, and most importantly, that precisely because conservatism has a historic reputation as the party of law and order, it has a genuine chance of introducing real criminal justice reform to improve both value for money and results. With the one of the most expensive criminal justice systems in the world and some of the highest reoffending rates in the OECD, this is long overdue in England and Wales. Secondly, it suggests that opposition to Ken Clarke’s reforms (radio comments aside) have more to do with personal victimisation from a recalcitrant Right than a genuine antagonism to the thrust of the policies. As it struggles to implement reforms to healthcare and policing, the Government must ensure that personality politics does not derail the right reforms in justice as well.

Will Tanner is a political researcher, focusing on criminal justice issues

“The only test ought to be truth… It is time to align jurisprudence with reality. There may be one or two technical instances where suppression is necessary… Otherwise, the sole criterion should be accuracy….The flip side, however, is that inaccuracy ought to be properly punished.”

Law and order can only function if it operates in tune with what people believe to be right. Governments can pass as many laws as they like and judges can make hundreds of banning orders, but none of this will work if it goes against public will. With regards to the super injunction case that is currently – and ironically – all over the papers, the Observer reports that:

“The footballer has since launched a high court action to force the social media site to reveal the identity of those behind the leaks, but users of the social media site responded by swamping the site with posts, repeatedly naming one player at a rate of up to 16 times a minute.”

While the Mail has discovered that the super injunction appeared:

“ doomed to failure last night after the total of messages about the star posted on Twitter hit 30,000.”

The public does not appear to believe that taking away a person’s ability to speak freely for the purpose of protecting the reputation of a celebrity is an appropriate use of legal powers. The judiciary should be sensitive to this.

Parliament wants to discuss the issues around super injunctions next month. I hope the debate is expanded into a discussion on judicial power and accountability. This whole episode raises some interesting questions: How can we ensure that the judiciary is accountable to the public? Who should judge judges? When is it appropriate to curtail a person’s right to express themselves? Is it ever appropriate for us not to know what is happening in our courts? Why is it that every review relating to the judiciary is headed up by judges and dominated by lawyers? What is the definition of ‘public interest’?

I think this misses the point.

Projects that release public service information aren’t about government hoarding data: they’re about opening it up. If I can access statistics that allow me to make meaningful assessments about crime levels, education provision, or hospital performance in my area – all the things that matter most – then that’s a good thing.

It’s an echo of the ‘post-bureaucratic’ age. This is an ugly and short-lived phrase, but a good and powerful idea – that information about services empowers the people that have to use them. Looking back at pre-election articles or speeches, there’s some interesting thinking about the role of information in accountability, and the potential to create the responsiveness to users that markets are based on, but public services have traditionally escaped.

Not all information is useful, not all government material will be appropriate for release, and better information isn’t in itself going to improve services. Police.uk isn’t perfect: crime statistics certainly need to be presented with appropriate warnings about their accuracy, and it’s arguably better for departments to release raw data for data-geeks to process and visualise, than for Whitehall to choose how to present the information.

But the general principle is sound: the more we know about how our public services are performing, the better.

I’m not going into the rights and wrongs of the case, nor whether he was guilty or not, partly because I haven’t been following the case and partly because I am not terribly interested in him.

What is interesting though is this: should he actually go to jail? The trials themselves have cost millions, and keeping someone in jail costs around £37,500 a year, though of course estimates vary and it depends what type of jail and so on.

Should he instead be subject to some kind of post-conviction control order? Wouldn’t it be better and cheaper to have him work, pay off at least some of the costs he has caused to the public purse, and have serious restrictions on his movements, actions and activities?

Say, for example, he was barred from all political or campaigning activity, and all public and media appearances. And not allowed even to vote. Say he’s made to work in the community – perhaps providing free legal advice (though given that he was so unsuccessful in defending himself this might not be the best idea).  Say he’s made to stay in one place all the time for three years, and be at home in the hours of darkness (though, hmmm, Glasgow has very little daylight in winter so he wouldn’t be able to work much – let’s change that to 8pm to 8am).

I think that would be a far more suitable punishment than having him sitting in jail, costing us yet more money.

And I think that same argument applies to many offenders. There is largely no point in non-violent offenders going to jail – they would be far better off having their rights severely restricted and having to make proper reparations in their community. This is part of the thrust of Ken Clarke’s justice reforms, which I think are potentially an excellent change.

Maintaining his tan takes commitment

Possibly the worst thing for Tommy Sheridan, though, would be no longer being allowed to use sunbeds.

The main points on which Tim and I disagree are these:

1)      These reforms will NOT ‘leave the public unprotected’ or allow ‘serious and repeat offenders [to] escape jail’ – they are not about indiscriminately releasing violent offenders because there isn’t room for them. They are about taking out of prison a number of people for whom custodial sentences are not appropriate, and giving them a push and a poke to try to reset their life path;

2)      The reforms are not ‘uncaring’ of victims, the public or offenders. Quite the opposite. They are about trying to solve the problem of crime, which makes for a better society for us all. Merely postponing it, and trying to keep a lid on it, does not fix the underlying problems – could we draw an analogy with the Coalition’s radical and widely-admired approach to welfare reform? I think we could.

3)      Incarceration does not cut crime; it defers it. While someone is in jail, they (obviously) commit no crime, but half of prisoners reoffend within a year (and it’s higher still for those sentenced to less than 12 months – over 60 per cent of them reoffend within a year), rising to three-quarters of young offenders within a year and 70 per cent reoffend within two years.  Reoffending rates for those sentenced to under 12 months detention are almost double that for those who are sentenced to unpaid work.

I think we’re at a decision point for our crime rate and regarding the costs of both crime and prison, and the government is trying to take radical steps to resolve that for the long-term.

In July, Ken Clarke made a speech which Marcus Booth wrote about here. In it, Ken made a number of suggestions for reforms he felt need made to the prison system.

This week, he published his Green Paper. Now, I know that many people who read this website are political obsessives but I think it would be useful to remind ourselves that a Green Paper is not a law. It’s a discussion paper, open to consultation and amendment, but setting out the direction that a government is thinking of heading in.

I’m not going to go through the proposals one by one (there are loads) but grouped together, the highlights are:

-          Creating what is effectively a ‘working week’ for prisoners, allowing them to earn but requiring them to pay back their victims, support their families and possibly pay for their board and lodging;

-          More, tougher, more intensive community sentences;

-          Holistic approach from institutions and to problems;

-          Six programmes to incentivise private providers to change behaviour, and allow frontline staff to innovate;

-          Give greater discretion to judges to decide on sentences;

-          Prepare for local police commissioners by giving police greater responsibility for ‘turning offenders away from a life of crime’;

-           Neighbourhood Justice Panels.

I think we can agree that if these initiatives are agreed and work as they are intended to, we should see the following:

1)      Reinforcing localism and encouraging responsibility, local police would be given greater discretion over how to deal with (particularly low-level) crime and disorder, depending on both their own judgement and the priorities that their local communities have voted for – for example, through the new Neighbourhood Justice Panels;

2)      Social problems would be treated properly in prison and during community sentences – this can only be of benefit to individuals and communities. Trying to keep families together, helping people with mental health problems, getting people off drugs, into a routine, into good shape to get a job – these are all good things. In the same way as many welfare to work providers are intensive life-changing programmes, this is a valuable (if rather intrusive) ambition for individuals and for our wider society;

3)      It’s likely that there would be some significant costs for the local, intensive programmes designed to fundamentally change behaviour. I don’t think that the ‘saving money’ case is necessarily the right one to make for these reforms, as I could see them being in the short-term, very expensive. In the long-term, in both direct and wider societal costs, the reforms should save money though.

4)      Something I am not wholly sure about is the proposal to give judges greater latitude in sentencing. On the one hand, it’s devolving power to the person with the capacity to make the most informed judgement; on the other, are we handing too much power to an unelected, unreformed judiciary?

These are hugely ambitious ideas. The government has opened them up to consultation for 3 months, and has given itself another 3 months before publishing any proposed legislation, on which no doubt there will be further negotiation. But something has to be done. We cannot go on postponing the problem.

Since mid-2005, David Cameron has (relatively) consistently advocated an enlightened prisons policy. I would be disappointed and not a little surprised if his government suddenly abandoned it. So much of this is about preparing for and explaining the policy properly, not being spooked off by rabid tabloid-like headlines, and actually looking at the facts.  I’m hopeful that perhaps the experience of the tuition fees process will have allowed the machinery to learn a few lessons here…

To end, I’d like to, perhaps tritely, quote Sir Winston Churchill:

“The treatment of crime and criminals mark and measure the stored up strength of a nation, and are the sign and proof of the living virtue in it.”

In my last blog I expressed my concern by saying:

‘My worry is that the vast majority of those protesting (and those watching at home) do not understand enough of the complex detail to have an informed opinion. I’m concerned that the decision to protest has been built on a foundation of emotive language gleaned from activists and the headlines which were ultimately based on Browne’s recommendation rather than what the coalition has actually said.’

YouGov released a poll and found that since the NUS ‘riots’ (as they shall now forever be known), 65% of people said that they has some sympathy with the demonstrations, but the vast majority of those disapproved of the damage to 30 Milbank.

‘Only 13% of respondents said they had sympathy with the direct action against the Conservative party headquarters. Asked if the violent scenes had helped or hindered the protesters’ cause, 69% thought it had damaged their cause, 11% that it had helped it (16% think it did neither).’

More generally, YouGov asked if people thought violent protest was ever acceptable in a democracy. 19% thought it was, 75% thought it was not.

So here we see the crux of the issue: the NUS had previously struggled to get this issue out into the open media forum for the world to see the ‘injustice’ and to have a transparent debate about what these fees will mean for the future of Britain. Now they’ve got what they wanted, but at a price.

The demonstration spun out of control and was apparently taken hostage by aggressive factions largely from non-NUS pressure groups wanting to muscle in on the action. The NUS has since taken the brunt of the flack with NUS President Aaron Porter seemingly being hauled onto every media outlet imaginable to answer for these few rogue protesters. (As an aside where is the practically dormant UCU in all this?)

Today we have a been made privy to a letter from Ivor Gaber Associates to the NUS with stark warnings and recommendations about how they can take hold of this wild horse of a campaign and direct it to a conclusion that this particular groups of activists would like. Demonstrations are good for demonstrating unity of expression – but as the letter says:

‘The current message about tuition fees is coming over as rather one-dimensional. The message the public is hearing – although not necessarily the only one being sent – is: “The fees increase is not fair. Students feel betrayed, particularly by Liberal Democrat MPs who conned them into voting for them at the last election. Now they want revenge.”

The message is not getting across to the public, the media or indeed the MPs who control the fate of the proposal in their lobby-treading feet. The NUS’ previousBlueprint campaign was relatively successful through the private lobbying MPs but was not high profile in the media. And MPs listened, even if they disagreed.

The NUS has always been good at privately lobbying for the benefit of their students – it is one of their biggest strengths. It shows that they are serious and deserve a space at the grown up table of political debate and policy discussion. Anyone can organise a rally (as demonstrated by yesterday) but for the NUS to be truly effective as a political organisation they must dispense with the rabble-rousing and focus on genuinely making a difference to the lives of their membership by applying their accumulated knowledge of the political process effectively.

When the riots broke out at Demo2010 I was at a policy discussion hosted by The Bridge Group in Victoria. The topic: improving social mobility in Higher Education(for an excellent summary see Monday 15 November). When the news slowly started filtering through there was a noticeable change in the mood in the room. Here was a disparate bunch of people – including those from the Helena Kennedy Foundation, Pure Potential, Sutton Trust, Brightside/Uniaid and national bodies including UCAS, HEFCE and SPA – the phrase on the face of the many and the tongues of the few was: “why are they being so counterproductive?”

They are right.

Or in a less convoluted way, the police don’t bother with calls relating to anti-social behaviour.

Let’s set aside my loathing for that very phrase – because either it’s criminal in which case treat it as a crime, or it’s a behavioural problem butting up against the norms of society in which case we all have a responsibility to address it.

Theresa May, who I have been hugely impressed by so far, has I think missed an opportunity with her response to this. She has said that it’s all Labour’s fault for having too much paperwork, and failing to get to grips with ASB despite the record amounts of money spent.

Well, yes, obviously and of course, but not quite the way she means.

What she should have said was something like this:

“Labour stopped police officers from doing the job they have a vocation for. By setting the police free, we will encourage them to police their own beat in the way that suits their own area best. Elected police chiefs will take full account of the priorities of residents, and residents will be encouraged to step in where they safely can. The Big Society is about trusting (in this instance) the police to use their judgement and initiative, backed up by citizens who are actively involved.”

There are numerous opportunities to bash Labour which obviously are all to the good and should be taken full advantage of. But it’s imperative that the government sets out its alternative vision at every opportunity, because people complain about not knowing or understanding what is meant by the Big Society.

I’d like to see, in five years’ time, this graph looking significantly different…

Let us be clear, there is a role for prison both to protect society from some of its most violent individuals and also to act as a deterrent.

I subscribe to the view that a prison sentence should be something to fear – there should be no toleration of drugs in jail, no perception that you are met with a stay full of life’s little luxuries and life sentences for murder should mean just that. There also needs to be an equally strong phase of rehabilitation and re-education prior to any release. Recent examples have shown the perilous potential results of premature release.

Over-crowded prisons and high re-offending rates however characterise the British penal system. Whilst we haven’t quite reached the dramatic US level whereby almost 1 in 100 adults are in jail, the prison population in the UK is now one of the highest in Western Europe and the highest it has been in British history. The number of inmates has more than doubled since 1993 from 40,000 to over 85,000. 20,000 inmates share cells designed for one and since 2007 80,000 criminals have been released early to ease over-crowding. That we can’t focus our energies to imprisoning those that actually should be there and instead are releasing violent criminals early due to financial pressures is scandalous. We could learn a lot from the Dutch model which has seen both a deliberate fall in prison numbers (and an emphasis on community sentencing) accompanied by a fall in crime.

Driving the astronomical rise in the prison population in the UK  is the proliferation of custodial sentences and especially short sentences. Two thirds of those in prison are there for less than a year and the majority of those are there for less than three months. Many of these inmates leave prison for a life of unemployment, homelessness, and crime.

Many argue that prisons are increasingly no more than ‘criminal training academies’, solidifying rather than breaking the cycle of crime. Re-offending rates in this country are alarming. Over 40% of inmates will re-offend within twelve months of release or 60% of those serving short sentences. This is the so-called ‘revolving door’ syndrome as the same people pass through jail several times. Despite New Labour’s pledge to be ‘tough on the causes of crime’, rehabilitation remains frustrated by a lack of funds and prison over-crowding.

The wider social impact is a serious if under-publicised issue. An estimated 160,000 children have at least one parent in prison and are three times as likely to engage in anti-social or delinquent behaviour than their peers. 65% of boys with convicted fathers go on to offend themselves.

Clarke blames the ‘bang ‘em up’ mentality of the past two decades which if allowed to continue will see the prison population rise to near 100,000 in five years. While he acknowledges that the prevailing wisdom is not completely misguided he does challenge a key underlying assumption, namely that a correlation exists between prison numbers and crime rates. While it is true that from 1993 prison numbers doubled while crime rates halved, from 1951 to 1971 prison numbers also doubled and crime rates trebled. Not unreasonably Clarke argues there are more important factors influencing crime rates.

This clears the way for greater use of community service to deter, rehabilitate, and reduce prison numbers. This approach has senior judicial support. The former Lord Chief Justice Woolf argued in 2007 that custodial sentences should be reserved for ‘violent criminals’. Otherwise sentences should be reduced and tough community punishments applied in far more cases.

Nearly two decades since Michael Howard fired the starting pistol of a rampant rise in the prison population, and with mounting evidence that conventional ‘wisdom’ is no longer working, Ken Clarke’s considered, evidence-based intervention is highly welcome.

 Marcus Booth is a former Co-Chairman of the Conservative City Circle Law Panel

During the passage of the Sexual Offences Bill in 2003, an amendment, later to be defeated, was introduced in the House of Lords that would have granted limited anonymity to suspects and defendants in cases involving sexual offences. Lord Ackner moved a clause that would have granted defendants the same right to anonymity as complainants, the Home Affairs Committee also came out in favour of anonymity for the accused; however, the Government rejected the arguments behind the new clause and it was subsequently removed by the Commons (338 votes to 173)

Now it has been brought forward again – a proposal had not appeared in either party’s election manifesto, although both parties had spoken in support of some form of defendant anonymity during the passage of the Sexual Offences Act 2003 and the Liberal Democrats had formally adopted it as a policy at their 2006 conference, which make the attacks of Kerry McCarthy in last night adjournment debate especially disingenous. Caroline Flint at the forefront of the attack goes onto to launch the standard line about women coming forward after the accused are named.

I’m dismayed. You could potentially attack the idea of ‘innocence before proven guilty’ under such reasoning. In reality, yes, the law does protect people who are accused of crimes. I’m afraid that we can’t sacrifice that principle purely because any accuser/victim wants to feel more comfortable reporting crimes.

Yes, publishing the names of the accused may have substantial benefits – for example, more women might come forward. However, in every area of criminal law, we must assume that people are innocent before they are proven guilty. People could simply accuse an innocent person of raping them solely so that their life is ruined. It happens – and it’s unacceptable. The Criminal Justice Act 2003 provided that evidence of the defendant’s ‘bad character’ or hearsay evidence may be admitted in some circumstances has led to the situation being even worse.

We should treat people as an end in itself, not a means to an end. A person ought to have rights – and the right not to be vilified as a potential rapist when you could, potentially, be innocent seems like a very decent right to have. That right shouldn’t be trampled over despite a competing objection that it would help in rape cases, for else the accused merely turns into a pawn/tool for the government so that they can get more convictions to boost their stats on rape cases. I value my right not be treated as (and associated with being) a rapist before an actual conviction has been made; and I don’t see how it should be trampled over just because the ‘mob’ desire it, or because it allegedly produces more convictions. Newspapers give a great deal of coverage of the opening of a trial with full details of the defendant, but by the time the trial ends, if the defendant is acquitted it has ceased to be newsworthy and the acquittal is not reported. It would be a serious advance if we did provide anonymity for both parties. It is time to end this injustice.

That is not to say that rape is not a very serious crime – it is. The rights and welfare of the victim are vital, and we should all be committed to ensuring that every victim of rape has access to appropriate support. In particular, the coalition are looking to establish new rape crisis centres where there are gaps in provision and to put funding for such centres on a stable and long-term footing. There are 39 such centres and they are looking at the possibility of a further 15, as noted by Baroness Stern’s review on helping the victims of rape. There are also a number of things the police could do a great deal better. Some women are treated with suspicion and dismissive comments. Others felt that lack of a specialist support officer hampered their chances of recovering and ensuring that the rapist was brought to justice. Baroness Stern recommended more specialist advisers, greater training, and more ‘intelligence-led’ policing, all of the things we should be looking to support.

Honesty is also required if we are to attaince for everyone in society – There is a misinformation put out by many, including in debates recently about the low conviction rate for rape (‘94% of rapes don’t end in conviction’ is the standard line). The rape conviction rate is then compared unfavourably to conviction rates for other crimes. Yet this is a myth. The conviction rate for rape is between 50-60%, which is higher than for most other crimes, the amount of hysteria being spread about these false statistics must be stopped, they are the people that have contributed to the publics scepticism of rape accusers, despite them claiming that allowing for anonymity may throw their claim into doubt. They are wrong. Allowing for anonymity of the accused would completely rid the image of a victim making false accusations for publicity or revenge.

Those attacking this proposal claim they are fighting for ‘womens rights’. I myself, would much rather argue for Human rights, the right to be innocent before proven guilty, the right for victims to be given the care they need, and the right for everyone to acquire justice.

There is a Facebook group in support of the proposals here. and a petition can be put together if people think it’s worthwhile to do so.