- •Введение
- •Hard News us panel on iraq to recommend gradual pullback
- •30 November, 2006
- •30 November, 2006 migrant tide is too much, says field By Phillip Johnston and Toby Helm
- •Berezovsky tribute to 'brave and honourable' friend litvinenko
- •Soft News mortality rate would plunge without passive smoking
- •Don't blame job stress for high blood pressure
- •Britain’s population tops 60 million for first time
- •Official: men are terrible shoppers
- •Features
- •Blair savages critics over threat to civil liberties
- •A criminal absence of logic
- •The naked truth about bad tv
- •Bush’s american empire has gone way off track By Ron Ferguson
- •Now or never for allen to pick own time to go
- •By Dan Sabbagn
- •Smoking: it's goodbye to all that
- •Suicidal children need our help By Dr Tanya Byron
- •A cheerful guide to violence at the louvre
- •Japan’s monarchy wrestles with idea of happiness By Norimitsu Onishi
- •News analysis
- •Time critical: mention when in the 1st or 2nd paragraphs
- •Written in the third person
- •Additional information
- •Sentence length: no longer than 25 words
- •Is legalising drugs the only answer?
- •The Sunday Times, April 30, 2006
- •Despite Democratic victory, it's clear: us isn't leaving Iraq in a hurry
- •Deeper crisis, less us sway in iraq
- •Editorials
- •Why are fewer students choosing to study foreign languages at gcse? By Richard Garner
- •Is this enough?
- •Bush's eavesdropping
- •Hedging on hedge funds
- •Letters to the editor
- •End of road for car factory
- •Real men mustn’t grumble about emotions
- •World book day
- •Mersey cyclists
- •Confidence in city academies
- •Reviews
- •Forever eighties
- •The problem with all this immigration
- •Where’s the sin in giving money to educate the most unfortunate? By Charles Moore
- •Why medicine makes us feel worse
- •Orbituaries michael hartnack
- •Advertisement
- •Quality newspapers vs. Tabloid newspapers set 1. Litvinenko case
- •On kremlin boss’
- •Poisoned for writing dossier
- •Set 2. Chess prodigy child’s death
- •Young champion's mystery death fall shocks chess world
- •Chess champion may have been sleepwalking when she fell to her death from hotel balcony
- •Young british chess star
- •In hotel death plunge
- •Dad 'raped' chess girl
- •Set 3. Augusto pinochet’s death
- •Augusto pinochet, dictator who ruled by terror in chile, dies at 91
- •Chile's pinochet dies
- •Chile after pinochet
- •Dictators right and left
- •Spitting on the dead dictator
- •Pinochet: death of a friendly dictator
- •Set 4. Avril lavigne
- •Sorry avril sucks it up
- •Avril could be jailed for spitting
- •Avril to wed boifriend
- •Avril lavigne, unvarnished
- •Set 5. Royal family
- •My darling mama, an example to so many
- •Charles leads the birthday tributes
- •Introduction
- •Note that the word 'briton' is almost exclusively found in newspapers
- •6. Prince vows to back family
- •Stating the topic and the main idea of the article
- •Pedal power helps charity
- •Climate changes may extend tourist season
- •Spotting the rhemes to support the main idea
- •Britten’s adopted home honours him at last
- •Now shoppers can watch the news
- •Enter Chaplin, played by his granddaughter
- •Well behaved kids get award
- •Producing a summary of the article
- •Music lessons can improve vocabulary
- •Children 'trade ritalin for cds'
- •Making an inference
- •Teachers show how computers can help
- •Introduction to analysis
- •Rendering the article
- •Inference
- •Hussein divides iraq, even in death
- •Appendix 3
- •Теория жанров в русскоязычной
- •Специальной литературе
- •Жанры сми
- •Genre classifications: different traditions
- •Genre Classification
- •In the East-European Tradition
- •Библиография
- •Оглавление
A criminal absence of logic
By Jamie Whyte
HOW SHOULD CRIME be punished? For many crimes, my wife’s answer is torture. In her view it has all the virtues to be sought in a punishment: it would be an effective deterrent, proportionate (because similar) to the crime, and cheap. This is an unpopular view, at least in our social circles.
Punishing crime is a tricky business because all punishments are, by necessity, nasty. Torture is very nasty, of course, but imprisonment is quite nasty too. So it was not surprising to learn that Tory thinking is turning against prisons. Mary Ann Sieghart wrote on the comment pages last week that Edward Garnier, the Shadow Minister for Home Affairs, thinks imprisoning criminals ''is hugely expensive and not working''.
This anti-prison position is certainly fashionable. But is it also true? Mr Garnier claims that prisons are failing because recidivism rates are high. Seventy per cent of prisoners are convicted of another crime within two years of being released from prison.
But doesn’t the high recidivism rate show that prison is not an effective deterrent after all? It does not. Testing the deterrence value of prison by observing the portion of ex-prisoners who commit crimes is ludicrous. It is a bad case of the statistical error of ''sample bias''. Prisoners are, by hypothesis, people for whom the threat of prison is an insufficient deterrent to crime. That prison does not deter those who end up as prisoners tells us nothing about how much it deters the rest of the population, nor therefore by how much it reduces crime.
Recidivism is a red herring. Nevertheless, Mr. Garnier may be right that prison is too expensive a way of reducing crime. Alas, Mr. Garnier offers no argument beyond pointing to the cost to taxpayers: £37,000 per prisoner per year. He seems to think that upon hearing this figure we will all leap to the conclusion that prison is too expensive. But it would be a leap of faith, because you cannot tell from its price alone whether or not something is good value. Is £15,000 good value for a car? It depends, of course, on what the car is worth. The same goes for prison. If keeping someone in prison for a year is worth more than £37,000 then it is money well spent.
When imprisoning criminals is such good value, we should be doing much more of it. Especially when, contrary to popular belief, Britain has such a low rate of imprisonment. Admittedly Britain imprisons a higher percentage of its population than any other Western European country. But this is a misleading measure, since it takes no account of the portion of the population who commit crimes. Allow for the extraordinary criminality of the British, and Britain has a low imprisonment rate. Whereas Britain imprisons 12 people per 1,000 crimes, Spain imprisons 48 and Ireland 33.
Measured properly, high imprisonment rates correlate with low crime rates: Spain and Ireland, for example, have lower crime rates than Britain. And when Britain began increasing its prison population 13 years ago, the number of crimes began falling. In 1993 the prison population was 49,000 and the number of recorded offences was 19 million. By 2005 the prison population was 75,000 and the number of crimes 11 million. The same story can be told for the US, where the crime rate has fallen steadily as the prison population has climbed.
Someone who knows these facts, as Mr. Garnier must, may still favour reducing the percentage of criminals sent to prison. But it cannot really be because he thinks prison doesn’t work. It can only be because he is very, very nice.
The Times, April 13, 2006
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* red herring – отвлекающий маневр.
* deterrent – средство устрашения; сдерживающее средство.