And yet, the removal vans had scarcely pulled away from No. 10 before news crept out that Britain’s prisons are full, and the Lord High Chancellor, Shabana Mahmood, may be obliged to release some 40,000 criminals less than halfway through their sentences, to ease overcrowding. The domestic violence charity Refuge has already warned that this means domestic abusers may walk free having served barely 40% of their supposed sentence.

To Starmer’s haters, the report is evidence of a broader far-Left utopianism: the ideology that wants police defunded, borders opened, and drug addicts “treated” with free drugs. His defenders, meanwhile, retort that the Tories created this problem. And it’s true that Britain’s prisons were at capacity before Starmer took office; last year, judges were being told not to hand down custodial sentences because there was no room to incarcerate the prisoners. Then, back in May, Sky reported that Sunak’s government had quietly introduced further early-release measures to ease pressure on prisons, even including inmates deemed “high-risk”.

Then, ahead of the election, Sunak reportedly turned his own inaction into a trap for the new administration. In May, he blocked a request to release up to 500 more offenders early, leaving the problem for Starmer to deal with instead. Taken all together, the headlines read more like a Tory landmine than incontrovertible evidence of Starmer being soft on crime.

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But even if he isn’t, his problems go deeper than just prison capacity. A glance at law and order in Britain since the last Labour administration reveals that the Tories did little to improve on Blair’s approach, and much to make things worse. And also that the New Labour policy on law and order had its own roots in a long-term trend of declining social trust and growing values pluralism. While the Tories’ record as inheritors to this approach leaves much to be desired, Starmer will find it tricky to do better: he has a far harder hand to play than Blair.

As the last Labour leader to secure a landslide, Blair threaded the needle between aspirational, liberal-leaning, middle-class voters and his more authoritarian Old Labour base by strategically emphasising law and order in measures such as the 1998 Crime and Disorder Act — even as he liberalised many other aspects of the country. This Act took aim especially at “antisocial” behaviour, and introduced new forms of non-custodial surveillance and control such as Asbos. As well as legislation, Blair also turbocharged funding for criminal justice, including a 21% real-terms spending boost for the police. This was all designed to operate alongside increased spending on welfare and social services. The rationale was alleviating the poverty that contributes to crime, while punishing wrongdoers: “Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime.”

Did the package work? It depends who you ask, and how you count. As one study reports, in 2005, the Blair government bragged about presiding over a 30% fall in crime; in opposition, meanwhile, Michael Howard accused Labour the same year of enabling a 16% rise. Both were right — just drawing, respectively, on the British Crime Survey and recorded police statistics.

Meanwhile, even as competing statisticians bickered over the data, Britain under New Labour continued to grow more intentionally multicultural and socially liberal — a pluralism in turn contained by Blair’s proliferating infrastructures of surveillance, social regulation, and para-judicial control. No one could tell you what to do, the “modern” British norm declared; but if you were too expressive in your individualism, you might end up with an Asbo, or an electronic tag, or a bevy of social workers to “support” you insistently until you did as you were asked.

These new architectures of social control served as a replacement for the shared moral codes that were already thinning under the hot winds of “there’s no such thing as society” Thatcherism, when New Labour were first elected. And arguably they worked well enough, enabling the continued pursuit of pluralism — at least until the money ran out. Then, after the global financial crash, we got Tory austerity plus some mumbling about “the big society”: in other words, much the same society-wide liberal individualism as during the Blair years, only now accompanied by cuts to the public services that had held things together in the previous decade. Blair-esque bureaucratisation of public space advanced, for example in the 2014 introduction of Public Spaces Protection Orders — but now such developments came without the blank cheque. Indeed, both the police and the Labour Party accused the Conservatives of real-terms cuts, by as much as 33%. Certainly, officer numbers fell by around 20,000 between 2009 and 2016, undoing the New Labour police workforce expansion.

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In other words, Blair’s legacy of suffocating social regulation has mushroomed, but enforcement has grown increasingly patchy. The corrosive cumulative impression has become that burglars can rob your home with impunity, and shoplifters can help themselves, but mean tweets will get you arrested.

But will matters improve under Starmer? It’s hard to say. So far, Starmer’s law and order approach sounds reassuringly Blairish: he is, for example, a longstanding critic of Tory prison policy, has promised 20,000 new prison places, and also pledged to prioritise antisocial behaviour and recruit 13,000 neighbourhood police officers. But Starmer’s choice of Minister for Prisons hints at some of the pitfalls he may face. James Timpson is CEO of the Timpson shoe repair chain, which makes a point of employing ex-prisoners, who comprise some 10% of Timpson’s workforce. Timpson is also former chair of the Prison Reform Trust, in which role he previously declared that “only a third” of prisoners should definitely be there.

Timpson’s advocacy of rehabilitation over jail time was echoed by Starmer following his election, when he vowed to cut the numbers reoffending and roll out a “tough love” programme focusing on “youth futures”. This proposal, dubbed “Sure Start for teenagers”, promises to bring together law enforcement, mental health specialists, and youth workers, in order to tackle knife crime. Elsewhere, Starmer has pledged to create “community and victim payback boards” involving “local communities” in dispensing justice for low-level offences.

All this suggests that Starmer — or perhaps the party behind him — places great trust in the power of non-carceral measures to address misbehaviour. And this, in turn, implies considerable trust in his government to be able to roll out enough of the social infrastructure this requires, to make such measures work. We will have to hope, then, that Labour can scratch together enough loose change to pay for it all. With post-1997 boomtime funding, “Sure Start for teenagers” might have been both compassionate and hard-hitting. Amid a fiscal crisis, shrinking tax base and stagnant economy, though, it runs a grave risk of winding up as a toothless half-measure: just the “more youth clubs” meme so often parodied on the Right.

Then there’s the pluralism. The mass immigration inaugurated by New Labour, in part “to rub the Right’s nose in diversity”, has now delivered a society so very diverse it’s becoming openly sectarian in some places, with white identity politics on the rise in retaliation. Indeed, His Toniness has already descended from plutocratic Olympus to advise Starmer to rein in immigration, in order not to fan the flames of “populism” any further.

In blithe disregard of these developments, Starmer’s proposed “community payback boards” will, we are told, bring together “community leaders” with other officials to determine community service sentencing locally. It sounds cuddly and decentralised; but is Britain still cohesive enough to devolve power in this way? Perhaps not; just recently, Labour MP Jess Phillips had her election speech booed by local pro-Gaza Muslims, in a context of such ferocious harassment and intimidation she didn’t even dare acknowledge its drivers directly, instead pretending to blame it on misogyny. In the context of such ethnic and religious fragmentation, anything that further empowers “community leaders” risks being an open door for tribal institutional capture, and even more accelerated fracturing of the polity.

Let’s hope none of that happens. Who knows? Perhaps Starmer will dredge up enough money to fund the police properly, build enough prisons to keep dangerous offenders off the streets, give “Sure Start for teenagers” the resources it needs, and roll out effective local institutions able to impose and enforce appropriate community service. Perhaps none of this will get politicised, or captured by sectarian “communities”. Perhaps all the muggers and loiterers and shoplifters will either be taken off the streets, or cured of their waywardness, and our streets really will get safer.

I hope they do. But I suspect that policing a radically pluralistic polity requires either hard authoritarianism, or a lot of money for the soft, Blairite kind. Starmer has an ebullient, freshly elected party of Left-wingers behind him, making the former politically difficult. And he has very little fiscal headroom for the latter. In that context, we risk ending up with the worst of all worlds: the same fissiparous polity and squeezed funding as under the Tories, just this time with a rueful grin and a side order of progressive humbug.

If that’s so, no amount of noble rhetoric about rehabilitation will disguise the truth for long. And it won’t really matter whether the label on the bottle says vintage social justice, or just sparkling anarcho-tyranny; the sour taste will be the same.

A century later, the question of whether we the people have a right to know about justice remains unresolved. Despite our obsession with “transparency”, it is becoming increasingly hard to know what is going on inside Britain’s courts.

“Atrocious”, was how the chair of the Bar Council described our justice system earlier this week, in an interview with the Financial Times. But just how “atrocious” is impossible to glean. Over the past decade, court reporting has withered as funding dries up. And no company embodies this more than Court News UK, the last court reporting agency to operate from the Old Bailey, where I’ve spent the past three months following their reporters for a podcast documentary.

“There are huge black spots now,” says Guy Toyn, co-owner of Court News UK. “London is still fairly well covered. But go up to cities as big as Birmingham, or Nottingham, and there just isn’t anyone there to see what’s going on. Let alone regional courts.”

For the last 25 years, Court News UK has been run by two reporters, Toyn and Scott Wilford. In the early days, they worked from a “windowless basement” bursting with at least three other press agencies, several photographic agencies, and dedicated court reporters from the likes of The Telegraph, The Times and The Sun. “It felt like a Fleet Street annexe,” says Wilford. They wrote up reports, then sold them to national and local papers. “At one point we had 10 reporters and two photographers. You could literally get an order from anywhere — I think there’s a newspaper up in the Orkneys that was one of our clients. They all had budgets. All these local papers around London had budgets. So you’d have a running list of seven or eight murder trials and be thinking: God, how am I going to service all this…”

What happened next is a familiar story. First the internet, then social media, blew up their model. By the late 2000s, national papers began to cut costs, and local ones mostly went bust, folded into bigger consortiums that stripped out most of the on-the-ground reporting and stuffed what remained with clickbait. Court News’s rivals all went bankrupt. The staff of 12 at Court News shrunk to four. Increasingly, the recruits are smart first-jobbers, who can make do with the meagre pay.

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The world, in other words, moved on. Much of the journalism that has passed into history isn’t worth sentimentalising, any more than the passing of the lead presses that used to rumble the pavements of Fleet Street. But court reporting is not like most other journalism. It is an almost artisanal trade that relies upon reporters trained in shorthand and familiar with contempt and libel laws, who sit at the back of cases for hours while arcane points of law are expounded, spooling out pages of notes. Whereas many media businesses were supplanted by slicker models enabled by the internet, in court reporting there is simply no alternative to being there. The legal fraternity and the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) are not going to provide the information, let alone parse it.

This is because the legal world is curiously insular. The courts tend to treat any spectators as an unfortunate nuisance. For the English and Welsh system, there is one rudimentary website that lists the following day’s court schedule by the names of the defendants. It gives no sense of the charges. And it is subject to change. In fact, it is common to turn up at the appointed place at the right time and be greeted by an empty room — the proceedings were probably moved, but no one bothered to tell the non-lawyers. For court reporters, the only way to receive a full list of the charges ahead of time is still to seek out the judge’s clerk, ask for them in person, and hope that the clerk is well-disposed.

Lawyers have little incentive to fill in the gaps. Even policemen — once happy to have a quiet word with the press about a particular case — are increasingly mute, tied down by the politics of their press offices. There is also no way of obtaining trial information after the fact. As the BBC recently acknowledged, it is impossible to request a court transcript in this country unless you have several thousand pounds to hand. As recently as 2011, stenographers sat on every bench. In a charmingly English way, they were effectively privateers — you could approach them directly, and purchase from them a copy of the official record. But a modernisation wave swept all that away: today, court proceedings are recorded, but the recordings are property of the MoJ. Because it is illegal for private citizens to possess audio of a trial, obtaining a transcript requires hiring a transcription service, which would have to type up weeks of proceedings, with the bill dumped at your door. One rape victim was quoted £7,500.

This matters, not only because of the problem of informational black spots across the land, but because right now court reporters should also be bringing us news on the overall decline of the justice system. On this, the Court News owners agree: in all their 30-odd years of experience, the system has never before been this slow or this useless. “When I started in the Nineties, judges were much scarier. Dickensian, even,” Wilford says. “But they got things done, and there was no messing around. All these murder cases would tend to open on a Monday morning. Now, the whole process seems to have slowed down, so nothing ever seems to start on a Monday. Excuses are made, and then you still find yourself waiting for cases to start on a Wednesday. I think the public would probably be staggered to see how slowly it moves. There always seems to be some kind of administrative blunder in the offing, or prisons don’t seem to produce defendants when they should. Always something.”

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One afternoon, during the months I spent in their office, a Court News staffer came back fuming about the sentencing of a Tunisian illegal migrant who slashed his 19-year-old girlfriend’s throat. The trial concluded; he was found guilty. But arriving at the court, the reporter found that sentencing had been delayed for three months, and no one could work out why.

Wilford would often turn the air blue as fresh court dates rolled in, incensed by judges booking in hearings for 2026. In September 2023, I witnessed the sentencing of the accomplices of the crooked cop Frank Partridge, where an apologetic Judge Christopher Hehir gave all the guilty a sixth off their tariff — because their case had been pending since 2015.

Eddie Beaver, who Court News recruited straight from university 18 months ago, agrees that the system is broken. “If I can think of an example that perfectly encapsulates the current attitude of judges, it was when I saw an email that a member of court staff had received at the Old Bailey, and it said the Old Bailey is going to have a ‘new culture’. One where cases will be dealt with swiftly: there will be no dithering. With the caveat that: ‘We will begin to implement this new culture in three months’ time…’”

Many blame budget cuts for the collapse of the justice system. During the Coalition years, the low-priority Ministry of Justice was chopped by around 25% in real terms. “But people have always blamed funding,” Toyn points out. “Ever since I’ve been here, there’s never been enough money. The difference is this: a few years ago, if you had some sort of ridiculous delay, the judge would be extremely angry. I remember a judge — I think his name was Stokes. When the barrister used to come in and say, oh, you know, this isn’t ready, he’d say, exasperated, ‘Caaaaaan we get onnnnn…’ And these barristers would be absolutely terrified, quaking in their boots. Nowadays, it’s all very laid back.”

And with 11 justice secretaries in 14 years, it’s not a problem the Government seems interested in resolving. “It’s just not sexy, is it?” says Beaver. “No one ever got elected on a promise to make the courts work faster.” But is that any excuse? After all, justice should be seen to be done — even if it’s not being done very well.

Hamlet lists one of the screaming tragedies of life as “the law’s delay”. All of the affronted have anguished that “surely there must be a better way”. And there may, but if it has been previously discovered, that knowledge is lost to us.

Those who have served as jurors realise: “Oh. There’s nobody here but us chickens…” We’re instructed to put prejudice aside, and rule on the facts as presented under the stringent rules of jurisprudence. But we are flawed and prejudiced, and many of the procedures we are instructed to follow are, of course, absurd. Again, the question presents itself: can’t we find a better way? Are we really going to set this depraved murderer free because of a technical error? Do we actually have to deprive this mother of her child because of some ancient statute? And so on.

Any who have experienced the jollity of the court in any capacity know that all parties, ourselves included, will scheme to exploit the absurdities, technicalities and ambiguities of the system to our benefit. We are constrained from too obvious transgression by fear of discovery and punishment; but all decisions, even by the Righteous, if such there be, will involve a calculus of the cost of an over-nice obedience to The Law.

Back in Vermont, in the Sixties, the Old-Timers used to refer to a fellow’s lawyers as His Liars — a designation in which there is more truth than fiction. At what point does a shading of evidence, or the gentle preparation of a witness, tick over from a healthy prosecution or defence into misconduct?

The determination of that point is the lawyer’s main job, for success in which he’s lauded. That’s the Adversarial System, which in America’s case is what we got, which is the survival of trial by combat. Opposing attorneys, given the same rules of procedure, fight it out, and, consciously or not, we accept that the chance of the more just cause prevailing is perhaps equal to, but finally independent of, the actual merits of the case — should the victor stay within the rules, which is to say, escape discovery of their violation.

The Old Texas Verdict had it: “not guilty, but don’t do it again”. We know its application was not limited to Texas, for the law can free both Jean Valjean and Teddy Kennedy, and isn’t life like that? Where there is law, there is injustice. Hypocrisy is the homage vice pays to virtue.

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What of overt and unapologetic prosecutorial misconduct? The aim of the current legal thuggery is suppression of a politically threatening individual by an administration usurping power. Our democracy is no stranger to it. Gene Debs, the Socialist leader, was jailed in 1918 by the Wilson government for his opposition to participation in the First World War. He was convicted under the Sedition Act, which criminalised expression of opinion questioning our involvement. The act was passed under President, elected in 1916 with the slogan, “He Kept Us Out of the War”.

Power is arrogant, and none of us is immune to its intoxication. Each of us knows not only the bully, but the meek narcissist who bludgeons us through his passivity, ineptitude, or unassailable good will. The first recorded acts of humankind are crime and disgrace. Eve broke the one law she was given, and Adam denounced her to mitigate his sentence. He blamed his wife, and his wife blamed the snake, but the snake blamed no one. What was the snake doing in the Garden? God put him there — he represents that portion of our human depravity which is not ashamed to sin.

More recently, some pedestrians strolling outside the Capitol on January 6 were imprisoned, and many are still held without charge. It’s a tough world out there, and the Government isn’t unaware of the delights and uses of power; little has changed since ancient Sumer.

But, as Passover is here, we might ask: “why is this night different from all other nights?” Answer: the indictment of President Trump demolishes the line between prosecutorial sharp-practices and naked persecution. The fig leaf of judicial probity is, granted, often transparent. But its glib removal yesterday announces an advance past that last firewall against thuggery: shame.

But now, rising crime is rapidly undermining the progressive consensus. Homicides rose 30% in 2020, and over two-thirds of America’s largest cities will have had even more homicides in 2021 than in 2020. At least 13 big cities will set all-time records for homicides, including Philadelphia, Austin, and Portland. Meanwhile property crimes in California’s four largest cities rose 7% between 2020 and 2021. Car break-ins in San Francisco declined temporarily in 2020, because Covid emptied the city of tourists, but they have since skyrocketed, reaching 3,000 in November. Many residents have stopped bothering to report crime.

Of course, many crime rates are still below what they were in the Eighties. And progressives are right to say that we shouldn’t panic about rising crime, since past panics contributed to cruel and crude responses, including overly long prison sentences with little in the way of real rehabilitation programmes. That’s why, in the late Nineties, I worked for George Soros’s foundation, among others, advocating for drug decriminalisation, reduced sentences for nonviolent crimes, and alternatives to incarceration.

But today it’s clear that the pendulum has swung too far in the other direction. In 2000, when I stopped working on criminal justice policy, progressives were advocating mandatory rehabilitation as an alternative to incarceration. Now, progressive prosecutors are simply releasing criminal suspects from custody without requiring rehab or extended probation. In Milwaukee, Wisconsin, for instance, a man who had run over the mother of his child with his SUV was released on $1,000 bail. Neither he nor his SUV were put under electronic surveillance. Soon after, he killed six people and injured another three dozen — by running them over with his SUV.

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Meanwhile incarceration rates in the United States are at a 30-year low. In 2019, there were 17% fewer prisoners in the US than in 2009. And while progressives are right to point out that nearly half of the people in federal prisons are there for nonviolent drug offences, it’s worth noting that there are eight times more people in state prisons than federal prisons. And just 14% of people in state prisons are there for nonviolent drug offences. Half are there for murder, rape, robbery and other violent offences.

While homicides and other violent crimes merit special attention, crimes driven by drug addiction, such as shoplifting, public camping, and public defecation, undermine the fabric of city life. Progressives sold their criminal justice reforms on the idea that nonviolent offenders would be released into some kind of supervisory care, focused on treatment and rehabilitation. But often that did not happen.

Consider San Francisco. Its jail population plummeted to 766 in 2021 from 2,850 in 2019. If progressives had done what they’d promised, there would be 2,000 extra people on probation being supported to stay sober and out of trouble. That hasn’t happened. And that’s troubling because many who are released re-offend. Half of all offenders — and three-quarters of the most violent ones ­— who were released from San Francisco jails before trial, between 2016 and 2019, went on to commit new crimes. Instead of benevolent paternalism, progressives delivered libertarian anarchism. And yet all that would have been required would have been weekly drug testing, check-ins with probation officers, and electronic monitoring.

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Still, if we are to reduce crime without returning to an era of mass incarceration, we need a new consensus around criminal justice — one that prioritises prevention and rehabilitation, rejects calls to defund the police, and views probation as critical to making alternatives to incarceration work. And all of that starts with understanding why people commit crimes in the first place.

Progressives attribute crime to “root causes” like poverty, inequality, and structural racism. San Francisco’s District Attorney Chesa Boudin, for example, recently claimed that, “Affordable housing, quality education, access to health care and addiction services can provide the stability that empirical evidence has shown actually deters criminal activity.” Of course these things are important, but there is no evidence that they prevent crime. Indeed, the study Boudin cited simply found that, in 12 cities where over 10% of population received welfare benefits, “more crime occurs when more time has passed since welfare payments occurred.” It did not look at the role of any of the factors he referenced.

Indeed, there is little evidence for the claim that poverty and structural racism have any impact on crime. African American crime rates were lower during the Forties and Fifties, when segregation was legal, poverty more widespread, and discrimination more overt, than between 1965 and 1990. Indeed, homicides among African Americans shot up after the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. And though it’s true that homicides rose during the first few years of the Great Depression, they then declined in most major cities afterward. And rates of crime, including homicide, kept declining after the 2007 financial crash and resulting recession, the worst since the Depression.

Homicide is irrational and emotional, experts agree, not a natural and predictable response to personal setbacks. Social conditions like poverty, oppression, and unemployment do not drive violent acts; people suffering from these conditions have varied rates of violence throughout history. Rather, one of the most important factors, when it comes to homicide, is the public’s belief in the legitimacy of the criminal justice system, as well as things like patriotism and “fellow feeling”. Homicide rates among unrelated adults in the United States closely follow the proportion of the public who trust their government to do the right thing, and believe that most public officials are honest. As trust in government fell in the late Sixties and early Seventies, homicides increased. When trust in government rose in the Fifties and mid-Nineties, homicides decreased.

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So anti-police protests take a toll. In 2014, a white police officer in Ferguson killed an unarmed 18-year-old black teenager, causing demonstrations across the US. Afterwards, the police chief in nearby St Louis noted that, “the criminal element is feeling empowered by the environment.” In 2015, the US Department of Justice asked one of the country’s leading criminologists, Richard Rosenfeld, to investigate whether homicides had risen after the incident. At first, Rosenfeld was sceptical, noting that homicides in St. Louis had started to rise before then. But after looking at the evidence, he changed his mind. “The homicide increase in the nation’s large cities was real and nearly unprecedented,” he wrote in his 2016 report. Rosenfeld had found a 17% rise in homicide in the nation’s largest cities, between 2014 and 2015.

Rosenfeld told me, when I interviewed him, that last year’s Black Lives Matter protests had contributed to the homicide increase. “When people believe the procedures of formal social control are unjust,” noted Rosenfeld, “they are less likely to obey the law.” And BLM protestors fail to recognise that the people who suffer most, when the police can’t do their jobs, are black Americans, who are more likely to be victims of violent crime. They are seven to eight times more likely to be homicide victims than white Americans.

But progressives have gone one step further, by undermining the idea that police actually have any power to reduce crime. “Law enforcement is not going to prevent the violence,” claimed Philip Atiba Goff, CEO of the Center for Policing Equity, a few weeks ago. In 2020, then–vice presidential candidate Kamala Harris tweeted, “America has confused having safe communities with having more cops on the street. It’s time to change that.”

Researchers find that negative publicity about the police has a powerful impact on police officers. Little wonder, then, that in 2020, at least two dozen police chiefs or senior officers resigned, retired, or took disability leave in America’s 50 biggest cities. 3,700 beat officers left. Today there are fewer police officers per capita in America than at any time since 1992.

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What liberals ignore is that there is good quantitative evidence that more policing can reduce crime. They argue that the police don’t actually prevent crime, they just punish people after the fact. But in 2009, President Obama’s stimulus package offered a billion dollars in grants to struggling American cities, to fund the police; cities qualifying for the grant increased policing by 3.2% and experienced a 3.5% decline in crime.

And there’s another inconvenient truth that liberals ignore: the evidence suggests that fewer cops may mean more police misconduct, because the remaining officers must work longer and more stressful hours. Working a 13-hour, rather than 10-hour, shift means cops are far more likely to experience public complaints against them, while back-to-back shifts quadruple the likelihood.

Still, progressives are busy gaslighting the public about their efforts to defund the police. A progressive columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle recently wrote, “while there is continuing debate about what is driving the violent crime increases … we know for a fact that defund had nothing to do with it. Because defund never actually happened.” This is patently untrue. After the Black Lives Matter protests, more than 20 big cities reduced police budgets by at least $870 million. The LAPD’s budget was slashed by $150 million in July, for instance. It’s just that homicides rose so quickly that most cities reversed their defunding budgets. “From New York City to Los Angeles,” noted the Associated Press at the end of last month, “in cities that had some of the largest Black Lives Matter protests … police departments are seeing their finances partially restored in response to rising homicides, an officer exodus, and political pressures.”

San Francisco is a classic example. After Black Lives Matter protesters last year demanded that cities “Defund the Police,” Mayor London Breed held a press conference to announce that her city would be one of the first to do exactly that. Breed announced $120 million in cuts to the budgets of both San Francisco’s police and sheriff’s departments. Last week, Breed u-turned dramatically, announcing that she was making an emergency request to the city’s Board of Supervisors for more money to fund the police and support a crackdown on crime, including open-air drug-dealing, car break-ins, and retail theft.

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Progressives denounced her plan. They oppose enforcing laws, when addicts and mentally ill people break them, because they believe “the system” is fundamentally racist, wrong and the cause of social injustice. This explains why progressives are narrowly focused on black people killed by the police, even though 30 times more black people are killed by civilians. And it explains why Boudin and other progressive prosecutors are obsessed with emptying prisons. (“The challenge going forward,” said Boudin in 2019, “is how do we close a jail?”)

Still, there’s reason to be hopeful. When Breed announced a sweeping crackdown on open air drug dealing and crime, she said, “I’m proud this city believes in giving people second chances.”

“Nevertheless, we also need there to be accountability when someone does break the law … Our compassion cannot be mistaken for weakness or indifference … I was raised by my grandmother to believe in ‘tough love,’ in keeping your house in order, and we need that, now more than ever.”

My time working in justice reform taught me that tough love works. The Netherlands and Portugal are often held up as progressive utopias, and while it’s true that both have reduced criminal penalties, both nations still ban drug dealing, arrest drug users, and sentence dealers and users to prison or rehabilitation. “If somebody in Portugal started injecting heroin in public,” I asked the head of drug policy in that country, “what would happen to them?” He said, without hesitation, “They would be arrested.”

And being arrested is sometimes what addicts need. “I am a big fan of mandated stuff,” says former felon Victoria Westbrook. “I don’t recommend it as a way to get your life together, but getting indicted by the Feds worked for me.” Today Victoria is working for the San Francisco city government to integrate ex-convicts back into society.

It’s hard work, but it pays off. Over the last 20 years, Miami has reduced its “homeless” population by 57%, despite skyrocketing rents, by closing open drug scenes and providing free psychiatric care, drug treatment and basic shelter. In High Point, North Carolina, police targeted three neighbourhoods with persistent crack cocaine dealing. There, police officers, accompanied by local community workers, met with dealers in person, asked them to stop, and offered them job training, tattoo removal and help restarting their lives. The officers gave the dealers unsigned arrest warrants, ring binders of the evidence against them, and video proof of their crimes. It proved to be good motivation for the dealers to clean up their acts.

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People in progressive cities are often shouted down for even suggesting a role for law enforcement. “Anytime a person says, ‘Maybe the police and the health care system could work together?’ or, ‘Maybe we could try some probation or low-level arrests,’ there’s an enormous outcry,” said Stanford addiction specialist Keith Humphreys. “‘No! That’s the war on drugs! The police have no role in this! Let’s open up some more services and people will come in and use them voluntarily!’”

But there is strong quantitative evidence that probationary programs that are “swift, certain, and fair” reduce arrests, recidivism, and drug use. The most famous of these programmes is Hawaii’s Opportunity Probation with Enforcement (HOPE). It incentivised offenders to follow probation rules by applying guaranteed, immediate, and short jail time for parole violations like failing a drug test. One study found that HOPE reduced drug use by 72%, future arrests by 55%, and incarceration by 48%.

A researcher summarised the benefits of the program, saying, “HOPE actually gets people to change their behaviour by setting up a circumstance where their natural behaviour moves in the right direction. They don’t want to be arrested and go to jail, so they stop using. That’s a profoundly rehabilitative thing to do.” In other words, HOPE rewards addicts and criminals for behaving well, instead of simply expecting them to.

It’s time for a new consensus on crime. Enforcing laws will reduce violence. Pushing offenders to take responsibility for themselves, when they leave prison, will lead them to independent lives, rather lives of crime. Progressives have done their best to undermine justice, as well as common sense, for two decades. As well as refunding the police, we should apologise to them.

A lot of the kudos and awestruck response to the novel came from an awareness of Sebold’s previous memoir, Lucky. In it, she wrote in detail about a horrifying rape she suffered as a teenager. It was a violent rape by a stranger, without a doubt. In the memoir, Sebold explained that she had identified her rapist months later when a black man, Anthony Broadwater, greeted her in the street. Broadwater must have been a friendly man: he smiled at Sebold and, she claims, went as far as to say “Hey girl” to her. Although she identified a completely different man in a police line-up, Mr Broadwater was prosecuted and convicted on her evidence, backed up by some now discredited scientific analysis of hair types. The memoir, rather skating over some details, told a redemptive story of obtaining justice by finding the culprit and locking him up.

The years went by. Broadwater was released from prison the year before Lucky was published, after 17 years. Sebold, having told her true-life tale in a memoir, went on to publish The Lovely Bones. At the time, I was a book reviewer who sometimes worked for The Observer. They commissioned a review of it from me, and I panned it. I had a fundamental objection to it. I just didn’t believe it.

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John Le Carré understood you

By Philip Hensher

Although a work of fiction is not true or false in the usual sense, there is no doubt that a novel can be entirely made-up, and yet fundamentally true. I didn’t believe a single word that The Lovely Bones said about human beings. I said, rather briskly, that 14-year-old girls were not like that; that Sebold thought people were defined by race (“Indian, and therefore mystic”) in absurd and damaging ways; that the novel went straight to courting emotion without troubling to be truthful.

It is bad manners to quote oneself, but I think my line that it was “a slick, overpoweringly saccharine and unfeeling exercise in sentiment and whimsy” is bang on. I wish I’d known what effects that unfeeling quality might have had in real life on an innocent man. In the review, I also suggested that this huge bestseller, in the usual way of these things, would be succeeded in five years by a difficult second novel that did zip business and then she would disappear.

That was more or less correct. She published a second novel, not much liked, in 2007, and then fell silent. All the same, The Lovely Bones sold an enormous number of copies and was made into a big-budget movie directed by Peter Jackson. I got a tremendous amount of angry flak from some people involved with the publication of the book, some rather personally homophobic in tone, some bringing up the horror of Ms Sebold’s rape as if to show she was the sort of person who could not write an untruthful word. In the meantime, Mr Broadwater tried to put his life together, working in menial jobs, and choosing, he says, not to have children so as not to inflict the shame of his conviction on them.

Time went on, and, it having become clear that Sebold didn’t have another novel in her to film, her memoir was taken up by the film industry. An executive producer of the adaptation, Tim Mucciante — rather a hero of this case, considering that he was acting with pure disinterest — started to wonder about the degree to which the script had changed Sebold’s book to sustain plausibility. He hired a private detective to look into the case. It didn’t take the detective long to establish that Broadwater had been wrongfully convicted on the basis of Sebold’s testimony. 40 years after the event, the racial attitudes that find it terrifying that a black man should have the effrontery to greet a white girl in the street, and that send him to prison for years because of it, are no longer quite as strong as they were, and Mr Broadwater’s conviction has been quashed. Sebold’s memoir will not be filmed, and has been withdrawn from circulation.

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Can you ever trust a jury?

By Adam King

Sebold herself has apologised, sort of. As literary criticism formed the basis of my not believing her in the first place, let me point out her reliance on the passive voice, robbed of agency, and how she can’t decide whether she’s talking to him (you) in a friendly way, or of him (he) in a safely remote way. Broadwater’s life “was unjustly robbed from you.” “I will forever be sorry for what was done to him.” It was “the system that sent an innocent man to jail.” Mr Broadwater was “brutalized by our flawed legal system.”

Reading Sebold’s apology — which goes on about what an honest writer she is, how driven by social justice she always was, and how she has always tried to “act with integrity” — I can only say that the opinion I formed in 2002 is still unchanged. I wouldn’t believe a word that Alice Sebold writes. From her books, and from this statement, one can only conclude that she has always felt a pressing need to present herself as well as possible, according to the drifting preferences of the American marketplace. For other people, the truth — or the truthfulness underlying the superficially invented — matter a lot more.

This case is not remotely difficult. Alice Sebold’s rape was appalling. Her initiating a process that ruined an innocent man’s life was also appalling. The culture that created the rapist is horrifying; the culture that created blame for a black man saying hello to a white stranger in the street is horrifying. There is nothing to take forward from this terrible series of events, however.

Men and women should be listened to by the criminal justice system with investigative purity; the truth or otherwise of their claims examined irrespective of whether they are black, or white, or Indian and therefore, it appears, mystically gifted. For myself I can only say that sometimes, the full forensic weight of the criminal justice system can establish a “truth” where a practised reader of literary prose on the page can see falsity, manipulation, deceit and a self-preservation that doesn’t care what it stamps on and destroys in the hungry pursuit of fame.

Perhaps we have progressed less than we like to think over the ensuing centuries. Our prisons currently hold more people than those elsewhere in Western Europe. The Netherlands, among other nations, has found that big reductions in incarceration rates makes little difference to crime levels, while freeing up more cash to challenge underlying social problems.

On his trips, Howard discovered prisoners cooped in cells all day; today, many are still locked up almost round the clock. His legacy led to pioneering prison legislation and building of hygienic new units with single cells — yet now many inmates must still eat, sleep and defecate confined in cramped, shared rooms.

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Life on the inside

By Elizabeth Oldfield

Our prisons are a national disgrace. We have a motley collection of 135 institutions crowded with often-damaged individuals who are being warehoused, either temporarily or permanently, out of sight from the rest of us. Many inmates have chaotic backgrounds, mental health conditions or learning disabilities. Most are detained for non-violent offences. Yet they are stuffed in places where violence is rife, drug use routine, suicide rates rising and self-harm running at horrific levels. Few of their fellow citizens seem to care what goes on behind the barbed wire and high walls, yet even the chief inspector of prisons warns they have “appalling living conditions” and “lack access to meaningful rehabilitative activity”.

Now there is fresh focus on the prison system after another terrorist attack — and this time by a jihadist fanatic who exploited efforts to help offenders back into the community. Usman Khan was freed under licence a year ago, seven years into a jail term for joining a bomb plot. He killed two young Cambridge graduates, Saskia Jones and Jack Merritt, who were filled with benevolent compassion for those less fortunate and attending an event run by a prison-based education project.

To underscore the complexities of these issues, those who thwarted Khan with such bravery included a man guilty of the most sickening murder of a young disabled woman, who was out on day release. “He is not a hero,” said one relative of the victim.

Most politicians know prison does not work, except as cruel punishment, given that recidivism rates run at almost 50% after one year — a rate significantly worse than in those nations which incarcerate fewer and focus instead on fixing distresses that can drive people to crime. Obviously the public must be kept safe, but a succession of Tory justice ministers have admitted that our wider incarceration policies have failed; one even said the system has become an unsustainable waste of money. Yet despite the prison population running at near-record levels, Boris Johnson has reverted to the jaded old narrative of trying to look tough on crime and demanding even more people are locked up in this atrocious system — as seen again of the weekend.

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Our politics of impossible promises

By Polly Mackenzie

So the Conservative election manifesto may be slim, but it still finds room for a barrage of populist stunts on law and order. Prominent among them is the creation of another 10,000 prison places, frittering away billions to add another 12% to prison capacity. There will be life without parole for child murderers, which takes away a judge’s ability to show the slightest mercy for, say, a severely depressed mother who kills her baby. There is a pledge to double maximum sentences for assaults on workers in the emergency services, although it is only 14 months since the last doubling of punishment for this offence. More stop and search, fresh action on knife crime (although prison sentences for possession have doubled in length over a decade) and yes, even that hoary old chestnut of ‘tougher’ community sentences.

This all smacks of sad throwback to the days of Tony Blair, whose desperation to shore up his right flank led to the absurdity of 28 criminal justice bills in 13 years of government and one new offence added to the statute book for every day in office.

There is a reason Johnson brushed aside the pleas of one grieving parent not to exploit his son’s death for political capital and instantly demanded that terrorists should no longer be eligible for early release as the blame game erupted. For law and order is  a key part of his strategy to tilt his party towards those who voted Brexit, often in traditional Labour heartlands of the Midlands and North. It fits with evidence that asking people if killers should be hanged or crooks whipped was among the best indicators of how someone voted in the referendum. More than half of Leave voters and Tory members back restoration of the death penalty.

These socially conservative, hardline attitudes highlight why Johnson has resorted to tired old tropes — and why Priti Patel, who backed the death penalty herself until recently, was appointed Home Secretary to re-assure these key voters. It explains why Justice Secretary Robert Buckland was over-ruled when trying to resist another pointless law on assaulting emergency workers created to please the police. And why Buckland had to dump progressive plans drawn up by his predecessor, David Gauke, to follow Scotland’s lead in scrapping short sentences, which simply destroy any stability in an offender’s life and have the highest rates of recidivism. So we carry on disrupting the lives of 10,000 people a year by pointlessly sending them to prison for less than a month.

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Our scandalous disregard for disability

By Ian Birrell

Johnson’s calculating stance corrodes his claim to be a One Nation Conservative. He is exploiting the misfortunes of vulnerable people — and indeed, of taxpayers forced to stump up £41,136 a year for each person kept behind bars. Only three months ago, the Ministry of Justice was predicting the prison population would fall slightly over the next five years. The House of Commons justice committee, chaired by Tory MP Bob Neill, last month slammed “policy by press notice” when warning the prison system in England and Wales was in an “appalling” crisis, lacking any decency or security. Sentence inflation due to headline-grabbing stunts has seen average custodial terms surge from 13.3 months to 17.3 months over a decade.

Prisons pick up the pieces from societal failure. Some violent and persistent crooks deserve to be in jail, of course, along with those set on jihadist terror — although even they can change their ways. But more than a quarter of inmates are from ethnic minorities, indicating wider structural racism.at least one-third have a learning disability, highlighting the dreadful lack of community support and crumbling social care system. Almost two-thirds have a reading age of 11 or lower, underscoring the scale of school failures and impact of family breakdown.

Seven in ten jailed men have mental health issues while women are at least six times more likely to display symptoms of psychosis than in the general public, more signs of the dire state of mental health care. I have also come across distressing cases of autistic people, their needs ignored or misunderstood by the authorities, ending up behind bars although this only intensifies their stress.

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The Kafkaesque nightmare of British justice

By Jenny McCartney

Yet once again we see self-serving politicians using such people as political pawns. This is a shame since some Tory justice secretaries from differing wings of the party — Ken Clarke, Michael Gove and Gauke — understood the urgent need for reform. They realised it is tougher to force citizens to confront demons of addiction, mental health struggles and educational failure than to leave them stoned all day in cells watching television.

Many conservatives in the United States have also come to see it makes no sense to keep locking up rising numbers of damaged or vulnerable citizens — whether on fiscal, humane, redemptive or criminal justice terms. I even took Gove to Texas for a BBC Panorama documentary examining the ‘Right-on-Crime’ movement that has swept the Republican party, prioritising rehabilitation over punishment and attempting to close the revolving door of imprisonment.

No such luck in Britain. Tory politicians just keep playing to the gallery regardless of the evidence and judges are forced to send people to prison for longer and longer sentences, filling up the cells with an ageing as well as expanding population. It is, of course, even harder to assess and monitor the small number of jailed people like Khan — reportedly numbering about 220 — amid such chaos.

The sad truth is many of the issues identified by John Howard back in the 18th century remain valid today: overcrowded cells, squalid conditions, poor healthcare, outbreaks of violence and lingering boredom. Yet now people are handed longer sentences, many prisons are swamped by drugs and we have made big leaps in understanding human psychology.

Our greatest prison reformer wrote in his book, The State of the Prisons in England and Wales, that “those gentlemen who, when they are told of the misery which our prisoners suffer, content themselves with saying ‘let them take care to keep out…’, forget the vicissitudes of human affairs; the unexpected changes to which men are liable”. Clearly human nature remains the same.

The abject state of our bursting prisons still shames our nation — yet once again our leaders focus only on building more holding pens for vulnerable human beings rather than tackling the problems that can lead damaged people into entanglement with the criminal justice system.