Challenging the complacent consensus

Is change, indeed, even possible? Or are we reduced to eking out small victories and minor concessions, while the penal juggernaut careers on?

As we approach the next General Election, the political debate risks becoming ever more toxic.

Earlier this month, the Home Secretary, Suella Braverman, accused Labour-run councils of failing to act on “gangs of rapists” grooming “vulnerable white girls” for sexual abuse. Labour responded with an advertising campaign claiming, among other things, that the Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, opposed imprisonment for adults who sexually assaulted children.

Last week in parliament, Sunak and the Labour leader, Keir Starmer, traded blows on prison and punishment. Convicted criminals were “walking free” from court, said Starmer, thanks to government incompetence. The government was “putting more people behind bars”, said Sunak, no thanks to “Sir Softie” Starmer, countered Sunak.

“No one any the wiser”, wrote John Crace in The Guardian, “as they clashed over who had sent more people to prison. Who could lock up crims the longest”.

Criminal justice policy-making also appears stuck.

The careful and cautious recommendations by the House of Commons Justice Committee, to reform the Imprisonment for Public Protection (IPP) sentence, have been met by government stonewalling.

Despite a landmark Supreme Court ruling in 2016, which found that the rules on joint enterprise prosecutions had been wrongly applied for more than three decades, the number of prosecutions continues to grow.

Earlier this month, a man fell to his death from a balcony in south London, after a police officer fired a Taser stun gun at him. His death is but one in a long line of deaths in police custody, or following contact with the police: 1,854 since 1990, according to the charity, Inquest.

The injustices of the IPP sentence, of joint enterprise prosecutions, and of deaths at the hands of the police are particular examples of a more general malaise. But it is hard to see a way forward when political debate degenerates, and policy-making is stuck in a complacent consensus.

At the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies, we believe that a creative, energetic and optimistic challenge is the antidote to the entrenched monotony of repeated policy failure. Grounded in principles of solidarity and the practices of collaboration, we think such a challenge can open up new possibilities for transformational change.

At our ‘Hope and Change: Campaigning for a Better Future’ event on the evening of 15 May, we will be discussing how we keep hope alive, for the possibility of change. Led by a panel of amazing and experienced campaigners, it promises to be an energising occasion.

Thank you to those who have already registered to attend. More information below if you haven’t had a chance to register yet.