Pensamiento de Diseño (Design Thinking)

Under the Coalition programme of government, crime policy has been purported to focus on the causes of the crime, more freedom for the police and rehabilitation programmes:

‘The Government believes that we need radical action to reform our criminal justice system. We need police forces that have greater freedom from Ministerial control and are better able to deal with the crime and anti-social behaviour that blights people’s lives, but which are much more accountable to the public they serve’ (Cameron and Clegg, 2010, p 13 ).

3.2.2.1 Cut the crime rate

It seems that the Coalition Government have learned from the criticism of Labour failing to enact the second half of their slogan. The focus of the Coalition Government in 2010 was on expanding the power of the police and reducing bureaucracy (Home Office). Much attention has been given

11 PPR, required the applicant to prove ‘that the marriage was not entered into primarily to obtain admission to the United Kingdom’ WATCH UK. (2009). How did immigration get out

of control? . Newspaper, [Online] Pages. Available at

http://www.migrationwatchuk.co.uk/BriefingPaper/document/116 [Accessed 11/10/2013 2013]. p,9.

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to the role of alcohol and drugs as criminogenic agents, as well as the holding of knives and firearms (Cameron and Clegg, 2010, Home Office).

Under the policies of the Coalition Government, much attention have been given to foreign nationals and their involvement with crime, especially drug, weapon, trafficking and other serious crimes, not least terrorism. Foreign nationals are often considered as a negative risk importer; therefore, many precautions have been taken under the guise of ‘defending’ the nation from the risks that foreign nationals are seen to bring, including terrorism, crime, social disorder, cultural issues, public health issues and strain on the economy (Hampshaire, 2009, p 229-230).

The trend in the most recent police statistics is an overall decrease in the recorded crime in the UK (Home Office, 2011a), but the extent to which information generated by the police can be trusted has been questioned by many, including Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary (Inspection of Cheshire Constabulary, 2014). Their report found no policies or strategies to direct and inform crime recording, relying instead on officers complying with the National Crime Recording Standard (NCRS) and Home Office Counting Rules (HOCR). Similarly, the ONS found:

‘in accordance with the Statistics and Registration Service Act 2007, statistics based on police recorded crime data have been assessed against the Code of Practice for Official Statistics and found not to meet the required standard for designation as National Statistics’ (Flatley, 2014, p 3).

Davies and Francis (2011 ) explain how the police have the authority to decide whether the reported/discovered crime is a notifiable (-recorded) offence, and therefore whether or not to record it as a crime. The ‘blurred’

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policy of recording crime, and the discretionary power of the police to do so, raise the question of whether the approaches in meeting the NCRS and HOCR are effective or even ethical (Inspection of City of London Police, 2014).

3.2.2.2 Minimising the pressure on prisons

After the big increase in the prison population, especially from FNPs, during Labour’s time in office, and the economic crisis affecting most of the Western world since 2008, Coalition Government crime policy tried limit the building of new prisons or increasing prison capacity. Instead, their policies focused on restructuring the penal system to allow for closer engagement with local authorities, voluntary organisations, and police and probation services. This was intended to deter society from engaging in crime, and to increase public confidence in the CJS (Lyon, 2010).

The recorded rate of stop and search has reduced significantly since 2012, which has ‘positively’ affected recorded crimes. As Theresa May stated:

In London, thanks to the leadership of Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe, changes to stop-and-search show that it is possible to reduce the number of stops, improve the stop-to-arrest ratio, and still cut crime. Since February 2012, the Metropolitan police have reduced their overall use of stop-and-search by 20%, and they have reduced no-suspicion stop-and-search by 90%. In the same period, stabbings have fallen by a third and shootings by 40%.

Complaints against the police have gone down and the arrest ratio has improved’ (Hansard, 2014e, col 831).

One implication of the decline in stop and search was a decrease in the number of new offenders sent to the court; instead the courts have been

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urged to reduce the population of those on remand in prison, resulting in a fall in their number in 2012 (Ministry of Justice, 2013b).

Furthermore, the focus on rehabilitating offenders was due to the 50 percent increase of located budget for prisons since 2000, the high cost of housing prisoners, and the high rate of reoffending. The then Justice Secretary Ken Clarke introduced a Green Paper ‘Breaking the Cycle:

Effective Punishment, Rehabilitation and Sentencing of Offenders’ in 2010 in order to focus on ‘punishing offenders, protecting the public and reducing reoffending’ (Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice, 2010).

However, the Coalition crime policy was also focused on addressing the issue that the increase in prison population was in part due to the growth in the FNP population. Therefore, it has developed a different policy, as the Justice Statistics Analytical wrote in his response to the FOI request made for this research to the Ministry of Justice (Ministry of Justice, 2014b):

‘Reducing the FNO population is a top priority for this Government and we are working hard to reduce the flow of FNOs into our prison system and increase the number of FNOs removed from the UK through Prisoner Transfer Agreements (PTAs)’

Deporting FNPs and ex-offenders has been touched on often in political and parliamentary debates, with the intention to remove pressure from the prisons and allow for the success of prison rehabilitation programmes. Some Tories have blamed FNPs for putting more pressure on the CJS; Peter Bone (Con MP) had this to say on the effects of foreign nationals on prisons:

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‘Wellingborough prison is in my constituency, and it is overcrowded all the time. Its prison officers, who do a wonderful job, tell me that they never have enough time to work with prisoners and get them educated, so that when they go back on the streets, they reoffend instead of being model citizens. That is partly due to the overcrowding, which is caused by there being so many foreign national prisoners’(Hansard, 2010a, col 55WH).

As a result of the new Coalition crime policy, the population of FNPs declined post 2010; however, the British prisoners population has increased at the same time (see table 6.8A). This has led some to reprise Martinson’s famous 1974 claim that when it comes to prisons reducing reoffending, ‘nothing works’ (Goodman, 2011).

In May 2014, the Justice Secretary Chris Grayling sought to impose an automatic six-month jail term for any adult convicted of a second offence involving a knife. However, the Deputy Prime Minister objected to the proposal, partly because it includes minimum sentencing, which carries ‘a serious risk it could undermine the role of the judges’ (Hansard, 2014b, col 966). It is no surprise to find the population of prisoners has declined, as the different crime policies have played a significant role in confirming the slogan: ‘the CJS is fit for the purpose’.

The experience of asylum seekers: A case study

In the past, the UK has demonstrated itself as a place that welcomes vulnerable and persecuted people seeking asylum (see Section 2.1.2).

However, the expansion of arriving asylum seekers since the 1990s created a problem, more specifically a so-called European asylum problem (Phillimore and Goodson, 2006). As with previous cases studies presented above, what follows will demonstrate the general

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characteristics of this group and the issues that are associated with asylum seekers, especially those relating to crime and criminality.