Easy Answers to the Prison Problem
David Davies, the Conservative MP for Monmouth, has argued for an expansion of the prison system in a post on the blog of the deplorably authoritarian Cornerstone Group. So he claims, prison helps society [sic.] by keeping known criminals off the street, with massive economic ramifications. It’s a rare frosty day in hell when any but the most intransigent statist agrees with the Cornerstone Group, but today is just such a day.
The Cornerstone Group represents just about everything that’s wrong with the Conservative Party. They’re Kinder, Küche, Kirche sort of authoritarians, keen on protecting the privileges of the elite, be they the Church of England or the aristocracy, while oppressing the rights of the masses, be they women or ethnic and religious minorities.
However, in advocating prison, they’re not the ones doing the oppressing. They’re the ones defending the oppressed: the victims of crime. By the back-of-an-envelope calculations performed by the Cornerstone Group on the government’s crime statistics, Davies believes that, by doubling the number of prison places in order to house ‘career criminals’ the country can cut the cost of crime in half. That is, for an outlay of £3bn a year, the country can recoup between £30bn and £45bn.
Unquestionably, one of the great problems of recent times has been the deliberate blurring of the lines between the innocent and the guilty: those whose rights are infringed, and those that infringe upon others rights. We’ve seen the innocent punished through ASBOs, the Terrorism Act, detention without trial, ID cards, trial without jury, and so on. At the same time, victimless crimes, that involve no infringement of others’ rights and are thusly not a matter of state concern, such as drug consumption, are outlawed by the Taliban tendency represented by the Cornerstone Group.
The other side is the one with which David Davies agrees: that the guilty get off without serious punishment, or even punishment at all. Most thieves and burglars escape custodial sentences altogether, while even murderers are released after a few years. If this can be fixed by £3bn, to protect the rights of the people so let down by the current system, it’s worth every penny.
Alternatively, of course, one can free up spaces by decriminalising those current activities that are illegal, but not immoral. Take just one area in particular. 12,567 individuals are held at Her Majesty’s pleasure in England and Wales for ‘drug offences’ [sic.], none of which offend the basic liberties of other people. That’s more than are held for robbery and fraud put together, and comes to 16% of the total prison population. Free these innocents, and the state can keep more murderers, rapists, and robbers incarcerated.
The key is to begin to discriminate between what is moral and what is immoral, and decide whether a given action harms the natural rights - to life, liberty, and property - of other individuals. If it doesn’t, it is completely inexcusable for the state to criminalise such an action, which is the mechanism by which it force its own morality upon other people. At the same time, it is the duty of the state to protect its citizens’ natural rights by preventing criminal abuse. If this quest is harmed by insufficient prison places, then that must be resolved, lest the state lose its raison d’être altogether.
Categories: Conservative Party, victimless crime, drugs, prison
Permalink
SpudHead said,
July 13, 2007 @ 4:02 pm
Bollocks! ‘Kinder, Kuche, Kircher’, you know that Godwins law makes your argument ridiculous before you’ve even explained yourself. Bad show.
Oli Cooper said,
July 15, 2007 @ 12:11 am
I wasn’t aware that a guy on an Internet message board was allowed to rule when an argument is ridiculous. However, it’s not that bad, as Mike Godwin didn’t actually say anything of the sort, only that reference to Nazism becomes exponentially more likely as the length of a discussion increases.
Actually, the High-jacked Godwin’s Law states, completely unsupported by any argument of itself, that comparison to fascism is false. Ergo, it reinforces the belief, falsely-held by many in society, that fascism is defeated, never to return. That is a lie, perpetrated and perpetuated by the state and its apologists (who make up the vast majority of society), to mask the parallels between fascism and unchecked statism. That is a fallacy, and not the determinant of others’.
However, if you are quite unhappy with comparison to that evil, let me restate the other comaprison to evil that I made: to the Taliban. The term ‘Taliban tendency’, used to describe the Cornerstone Group and thousands of Conservatives that buy into its pernicious brand of statism, was coined not by a man behind a keyboard on an Internet message board, but by Alan Duncan, Shadow Secretary of State for Trade, Industry, and Energy.
Squander Two said,
August 7, 2007 @ 11:27 am
> 12,567 individuals are held at Her Majesty’s pleasure in England and Wales for ‘drug offences’ [sic.], none of which offend the basic liberties of other people.
I agree that drug-taking doesn’t harm others and shouldn’t be punished, but I imagine that some of those drug offences involve dealing and trafficking, not just using, and dealers and traffickers certainly do harm others, since they are involved in large and murderous organised crime syndicates.
That’s not to say you’re wrong, just that you need a more precise statistic to back up your argument.
Oli Cooper said,
August 7, 2007 @ 2:59 pm
If one is agreed that taking drugs doesn’t harm others, then, surely, by the same dint, one can also agree that dealing and trafficking do no harm, either. If someone else agrees to purchase the drug, that’s their choice, not a matter for the state. By the process of mutual consent, value and utility - happiness - are created, which the state tries to put an end to by enforcing its point of view.
The statistic in question is simply for those that are incarcerated for those offences. It is not for offences related to the drugs trade, but merely for the ‘crimes’ of taking, trafficking, or manufacturing controlled substances. Thus, if one murders another person as part of a gang war, or steals to pay for drugs, those are classified under different activity groups, not within the 12,567 offneces cited above. The actually immoral acts have already been deducted.
Indeed, by decriminalising drugs, those immoral acts will be reduced. By criminalising drugs, it encourages violence and theft, forces drug dealers to associate in (as you correctly describe) murderous organisesd crime syndicates. If one wants to see the potential effect, one only needs to ask how many times a GlaxoSmithKline employee has been murdered by a rival from AstraZeneca (or, before AZ’s lawyers get on my case, vice versa). The answer’s none, and that’s because their business is legal, not necessarily because it’s moral.
By criminalising a moral act, one forces people to act immorally. Drug dealers lose the deterrent to obey the just laws, and see no reason NOT to murder; drug users are forced to pay an exhorbitant premium on a substance little harder to manufacture than paracetemol, and have to steal to pay the bills; without legal recourse, the drug user is exposed to sub-standard produce, cut with rat poison. If one is concerned by the murder, theft, and deceit associated with the drugs trade, the best way to stamp them out, and restore order to the streets, is to legalise the drugs now.