Night of the long knives

Failed Blairite policies will not solve crime and antisocial behaviour, argues Prof Claire Hamilton. Experience has shown them to be, at best, ineffective and, at worst, counter-productive in terms of tackling crime

In politics, so the saying goes, there is nothing new under the sun. All the more so, it seems, when it comes to the feverish activity that often surrounds the politics of crime and its control.

Since his appointment as Taoiseach, Simon Harris appears to have recommitted the Fine Gael party to a tougher style of penal politics, taking up its traditional mantle as the ‘party of law and order’.

This was followed more recently by Justice Minister Helen McEntee’s announcement of longer sentences for knife crimes and a crackdown to target antisocial behaviour, including provisions to make it easier to issue an antisocial behaviour order, or ASBO.

Such measures have about them a strong ring of failed New Labour justice policies. Indeed, the former Taoiseach Leo Varadkar’s recent assertion that Fine Gael “should be tough on crime and tough on the causes of crime” reproduces, verbatim, Tony Blair’s now infamous mantra.

Attractive as these policies may be as curtain-raisers for the next general election, the problem is that experience has shown them to be, at best, ineffective and, at worst, counter-productive in terms of tackling crime.

Bad boy boogie

Take knife crime, for example. Britain stands out here, among both English-speaking and European countries, for the media and political attention it has devoted to knife-related violence.

A slew of legislation, stop-and-search policies, and initiatives have ensued, including laws increasing sentences on knife crime (none, incidentally as high as the seven-year maximum proposed by our minister).

However, international research published by the Australian Institute of Criminology and World Health Organisation suggests that criminal-justice based interventions and, in particular, tougher penalties for knife crime, have not had a deterrent effect.

Young people carrying knives predominantly for self-protection are unlikely to be deterred. This is well illustrated in an interview carried out with a young knife carrier in Scotland, when he said: “No – cos you can’t just stop carrying a knife because you might get four, five years. You’ve got worries” (Knife Crime Interventions: ‘What Works?).

To some degree, therefore, lengthier sentences punish those who are most fearful.

Brain shake

What has worked, on the other hand, is a public-health approach, involving multiple agencies engaged in prevention work for at-risk groups, as well as law-enforcement activity directed at offenders.

Hospitals are particularly promising sites of intervention aimed at reaching out to young people at a ‘teachable moment’ or moment of intense crisis, with several of these programmes emerging as part of the British Government’s Serious Violence Strategy.

The situation in Ireland when it comes to knife crime is uncertain, and it is unclear on what evidence the minister is basing her assertion that it presents as an “incremental” problem.

‘Knife crime’ is a somewhat nebulous, catch-all term used to refer to a collection of different offences in which a knife is used. As such, it’s important to differentiate between, on the one hand, knife-carrying/possession offences and, on the other, the use of knives in violent crime.

This observation feeds into attempts to measure the extent of the problem: possession offences in particular are susceptible to distortion due to police proactivity or ‘surge’ policing in this area. This issue was recently identified in Ireland in relation to the implementation of a new exhibit recording system.

The last report on knife crime was published over three years ago and suggested generally declining levels of incidents involving knives, including a general trend of decline in discharges of patients for knife-related assaults.

Pending the publication of an updated garda report on this area (currently being prepared), the extent to which we even have a problem that requires a response remains an open question.

Problem child

Antisocial behaviour was also a key plank of the ‘New Labour’ agenda in the late 1990s/early 2000s, ushering in a range of measures, such as ASBOs, which were clearly designed with juvenile ‘antisocial behaviour’ in mind.

In Ireland, despite the introduction of our own antisocial behaviour legislation in 2006, there has been little recourse to ASBOs, reflecting perhaps a sense that they “do not serve a clear purpose” in the justice system.

ASBOs are essentially civil orders that seek to protect people from antisocial forms of behaviour, but which attract a criminal penalty for non-compliance.

The result of their roll-out in England and Wales has been nothing short of a fiasco: a high rate of non-compliance or breach of the orders (up to 68% for children); the criminalisation of neurodiverse children, homeless persons and other vulnerable groups; and a long line of litigation that has sought to decouple the criminal from the civil element of the order, ultimately replacing the ASBO with new legislation.

There is also the question of lowering the threshold for entry to the justice system to what is, effectively, ‘sub-criminal’ behaviour, or what criminologists call ‘net-widening’.

As the Council of Europe’s Commissioner for Human Rights, Alvaro GilRobles, pointed out in a searingly critical 2005 report, because the ASBO system increases the numbers of young people in custody, “it is more likely to exacerbate antisocial behaviour and crime amongst youths than effectively prevent it”.

Rebooting the ‘anti-social-behaviour agenda’ in this jurisdiction also runs contrary to the stated aim of the youth-justice system, which is to divert children away from it.

A wealth of criminological evidence, including the acclaimed longitudinal Edinburgh Study of Youth Transitions and Crime, has found that the deeper that children are drawn into the system, the more harmful it is for their prospects of refraining from offending. In other words, the system itself has a criminogenic effect.

Breaking the rules

All of the above is not to deny the impact of antisocial behaviour on Irish communities or young people themselves. As Fintan O’Toole argued in The Irish Times at the time of the 2006 legislation, “antisocial behaviour matters to the lives of too many people and causes too much daily misery to be the object of cynical gesture politics”.

Knife use, too, while only a small proportion of all violence, is clearly a serious event, which has been described as a ‘signal’ crime – one that communicates a powerful ‘warning’ message to a community that all is not well.

In both of these areas, we should seek to align ourselves with, rather than against, international best practice. A rehashing of the failed policies of our nearest neighbours will not do.

Claire Hamilton is professor of criminology in Maynooth University School of Law and Criminology