Crime, Policy and the Media: The Shaping of Criminal Justice, 1989‐2010

Citation

Bateman, T. (2013), "Crime, Policy and the Media: The Shaping of Criminal Justice, 1989‐2010", Safer Communities, Vol. 12 No. 3, pp. 146-148. https://doi.org/10.1108/SC-02-2013-0002

In the introductory chapter of this well written, and thoroughly engaging, book, Jon Silverman records that when he approached the Home Office for copies of all press releases issued between 2001 and 2009, he received 3,214 notices. This deluge of information, which would have been significantly larger but for the department losing responsibility for an array of functions – including prisons, courts and probation – to the newly created Ministry of Justice in May 2006, is clear testament to the importance attached by New Labour to communication with the media on issues of crime and justice.

The media has itself been transformed in the recent past with the development of a “news machine” (p. 4) that requires a sizeable political contribution to assuage the press/public demand for 24‐hour coverage. At the same time, according to Silverman, the media has become increasingly characterised by two, apparently paradoxical, tendencies: a perpetual orientation towards new news, inevitably superficial and transient, combined with an ability to obsess over particular stories that capture attention and accordingly merit extended treatment.

This context raises a serious of questions with which the author aims to engage. Are the shifts within the media self‐generated or have they been encouraged by a greater political concern to manage information, in the hope of harnessing public opinion for the sake of electoral advantage? Do the media exert undue influence over criminal justice policy or, conversely, is news coverage, under pressure from a requirement for infinite copy, a conduit for an uncritical reporting of the government agenda? Does a more finely nuanced relationship pertain, in which the media and political spokespeople are mutually complicit in establishing the broad framework within which legitimate policy debates are constrained? What are the implications of the first three questions for a criminal justice policy and (and ultimately) practice which ought, or frequently purports, to develop in accord with evidence of effectiveness and a concern with fairness, proportionality and human rights?

Silverman is particularly well placed to offer informed answers to such questions. As Home Affairs correspondent for the BBC between 1989 and 2002 (the former date coinciding with the starting point for the book's analysis), he has extensive experience of the manufacture of criminal justice news. That role simultaneously provided personal acquaintance with most of the key political actors over the relevant period, allowing informed insight into the other side of the relationship. Indeed, the benefit of such personal contacts is evidenced in the access afforded the author to facilitate the collation of much of the primary data which illustrate the contours of his argument. They derive in large part from semi‐structured interviews with a range of criminal justice professionals (including a former Lord Chief Justice), prominent civil servants (including former political advisors to prime ministers and home secretaries) and politicians, among whom rank six former home secretaries.

The author's “insider status” never blunts his critical edge however and, while interviewees are allowed ample opportunity to voice their opinions through verbatim quotations, where these might be considered self‐serving in the light of other available evidence, Silverman is not afraid of saying so. The result is a work of considerable interest that offers valuable insights across the criminal justice landscape.

The analysis starts from a consideration of the “punitive turn” where Silverman paints a broader canvass than that which frequently frames “popular punitiveness” (Bottoms, 1995) in the UK as a phenomenon for which the murder of James Bulger in 1993 was the principal trigger. In particular, he argues that media representations establishing a conceptual link between youth crime and crime had become prevalent in the period immediately prior to the brutal killing of a toddler by two boys themselves barely above the age of criminal responsibility, such that Ken Clarke, then Home Secretary, had already acceded that “there was a case for increasing court powers to lock up” young children in conflict with the law at the Police Federation conference in 1992. Tony Blair, on appointment as shadow home secretary had also signalled a punitive shift in Labour's thinking on criminal justice prior to the Bulger case, but found that sympathetic media coverage of his party's newly adopted stance was much easier to acquire after it.

The media was thus a catalyst which, in combination with the punitive (particularly Michael Howard, but also Jack Straw and Blair) and populist (as exemplified by the New Labour leadership) political sentiments, helped to inaugurate a law and order arms race that dominated the criminal justice discourse for the remainder of the decade and beyond. It was a process that led politicians and the press to join forces in a series of confrontations. Michael Howard's tenure as Home Secretary from 1993 onwards, saw him pitted against the “liberal establishment” of the Home Office as he struggled to enshrine “prison works” as the new government mantra on law and order, which – according to the then Director General of the Government Information and Communication Service – required him to win “the battle in the media” (p. 57). Howard's speech writer contends that this paved the way for the “more robust approach to crime” championed by the architects of New Labour (p. 55). Howard and his successors were similarly drawn into a series of altercations with the judiciary, initially over what from the new political perspective was unduly lenient sentencing, and following the passage of the Human Rights Act 1998, what was presented as the inappropriate focus on offenders’ rights at the expense of the “law abiding majority”. When the European Court of Human Rights determined, more than a decade later, that the indiscriminate barring of prisoners from voting was a breach of the European Convention, such skirmishes ensured that the political debate was framed by headlines questioning whether the commitment to the Convention should be abandoned. The same dynamic dictated that the Coalition government would respond by condemning the assault on British sovereignty and by maintaining that “public protection must come first” (p. 38). There was a similar rejoinder to the legal decision that those subject to sex offender registration should have the right to some form of review, albeit that the case was heard in the UK Supreme Court rather than Strasbourg. Silverman convincingly argues that since the sex offender register can only be effective if the numbers subject to registration are kept at manageable proportions, the rhetoric of protection of the public was in fact a smokescreen for politicians protecting their tough reputation, while courting sympathetic tabloid endorsement. Further evidence in this regard is offered in his analysis of the introduction of imprisonment for public protection and of the establishment of administrative (rather than court ordered) recall for breach of post custodial licence. Both measures, the author contends, were more about political back covering rather than public protection.

Other chapters explore the increasing influence of the prime minister in areas traditionally left to home secretaries, policing and the media, and terrorism, but from the perspective of this reviewer, the two chapters dealing with drugs policy are particularly compelling. Silverman's position is that this policy area, to a much greater extent than other comparable issues, has less to do with evidence of what might work – in this case, to control the availability of illicit substances and to reduce harm from their ingestion – and more to do with a political and media desire to uphold an outdated morality that is regularly reinforced by moral panics over new forms of addiction and their consequences. The analysis is supported by a detailed and persuasive overview of the farce surrounding the reclassification of cannabis and Home Secretary Alan Johnson's sacking of the government's expert advisor for having the temerity to voice his disagreement with government policy. Silverman concludes the discussion by pointing to the different direction of travel in much of Europe, asking rhetorically: “Is it pure coincidence that, unlike the UK, none of these countries has such an influential tabloid media which feeds it readers a daily diet of binary archetypes – ‘evil’ drug dealers, ‘innocent’ victims, and so on – and thus imprisons the policymakers in a time legislative space bounded by a 40‐year‐old law, the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971” (p. 114).

If there is one criticism of the text, it is that it was written a year too early. The revelations of phone hacking at the News of the World were just breaking as the manuscript was sent for typesetting. A dissection of the findings of the Leveson inquiry would have provided the material for a fitting concluding chapter. That said, this book addresses an important issue extremely well and anyone with a passing interest in the relationship between crime policy and evidence will benefit from engaging with the arguments contained therein. A health warning is attached, however: reading it is unlikely to increase public confidence in criminal justice policy or the media who report it.