Shoplifters of the world...

by Alan Tyers

The middle-classes, when not high on cocaine, binge-drinking or being given life in prison for getting a parking ticket, are now apparently mad for the shoplifting.

A report from snappily-named security and merchandising specialists Checkpoint Systems NCE reckons that shoplifting is up 20% - costing businesses an eye-watering £4.9 billion a year.

Says that company’s spokesman: “We are seeing more instances of amateur thieves stealing goods for their own personal use rather than to sell-on.

“This is epitomised in the recent uprising of the middle-class shoplifter, someone who has turned to theft to sustain their standard of living, and this is driving theft of items such as cosmetics, perfumes and face creams, alcohol, fresh meat, mobile phones, computer games and DVDs as well as small electrical goods like cameras, iPods and personal care gadgets.”

What can be done about these crazed fiends, with their insatiable desire for meat and cosmetics?

Seems to me that this is a result in the growing sense of entitlement that we all have: everyone wants a lifestyle rich in consumer goods and nice things, and the freely available credit of the last generation made it dead easy to get things on the never-never. Now credit is harder to get, but demand is the same, so we’ll have to nick what is rightfully ours. I blame The X Factor.

Aside from inflated expectations of what is our right, or even our need, some goods are just ridiculously overpriced and cartelised. Maybe people are just sick of forking over a fortune for products that they know are massively marked-up by greedy retailers.

If I wasn’t such a chicken, here are some items I would definitely nick from supermarkets: bin bags; tissues; razor blades. The items are not, despite what it might sound like, to form the basis of some horrific murder / clean-up kit, but rather just things that always seem staggeringly overpriced.

Oh, and I’d definitely trouser a few bottles of contact lens solution if I could get away with it. Five quid for that? Come off it.

Shame not jail

by Greg McDonald

The student caught on camera drunkenly urinating on war memorial poppy wreaths deserves the shame and humiliation he will live with for many years to come - but he shouldn’t go to jail.

Philip Laing has no excuses. His lawyers paint a picture of a student with a bright future, innocently caught up in a drinking culture and now struck with remorse. But being middle class doesn’t excuse you from equal treatment before the law, any more than downing 10 Stellas excuses you running the next-door neighbour down in the family car.

And as for remorse, it’s funny how so few of Laing’s fellow louts are as remorseful about the crimes that don’t get splashed across the front of national newspapers.

But while Laing’s misdeed is revolting, it’s also a single youthful mistake - and however disgusted we may feel, we should remember that few of us didn’t make a few mistakes of our own along the way.

Granted, many premeditated and evil crimes committed in Britain deserve a harsher punishment than our legal system has the resources or will to enforce. But as ugly as Laing’s drunken misdemeanor may be, his is not one of those.

The judge is right to hang the prospect of jail over Laing’s head for a fortnight while he awaits sentencing. But, while the student deserves his shame, in this instance – just for once – a custodial sentence would be excessive.

The appliance of science

by Greg McDonald

Members of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs are right to resign over the Home Secretary’s knee-jerk sacking of Government drug adviser Professor David Nutt, just as Nutt is right that it is not the role of scientists to “rubber stamp” pre-determined Government positions.

Alan Johnson’s disingenuous argument that the Professor’s views amount to a campaign against the Government no more chimes with the evidence than does the Home Secretary’s backward drugs policy.

For far from the ravings of a substance evangelist Nutt’s words are not personal views at all, but the findings of a scientific study. The Professor is no more guilty of campaigning against the Home Office line by stating them than a maths teacher is guilty of railing against straight lines when explaining the definition of a circle.

Yet there is a wider issue here. It’s little wonder Joe Public, fifth Stella in hand, is shocked to hear a scientist say that “ecstasy is safer than horse-riding” - because Joe’s view of drugs, as with so much of British politics, is based more on heated headline hysteria than cold evidence.

And as one department after another backs a counterproductive policy to placate such prejudices, until the hysteria typified by Nutt’s sacking is challenged we’ll all keep paying the high price of knee jerk policy-making.

Members of the Advisory Council are right to make a stand - for until British governments are forced to confront reality, destructive policies will continue to be made not in the lab but in the pub.

High time for honesty

by Greg McDonald

The Government's chief drug adviser is right that illegal drugs like ecstasy and cannabis are less dangerous than alcohol and cigarettes - and it's high time we had the sober-minded sense to legalise the lot.

Professor David Nutt attacks politicians for "distorting" the research evidence, and singles out disgraced former Home Secretary Jacqui Smith for contradicting his statement that ecstasy is no more dangerous than riding a horse.

Jacqui Smith misleading the public?! And pigs will walk!

Ranking Britain's drugs in a sort of Top 40 of harmfulness, Nutt produces an interesting chart - for while poppy-pickers won’t be surprised to find heroin and cocaine in the top spots, hardcore alcohol fans may be shocked to find their preferred hit keeping newer entries like cannabis and ecstasy out of the Top 10.

Dr Nutt’s brave honesty highlights a stark truth - the damage drugs do to our society is nothing compared to the carnage caused by criminalisation.

The tragedy of criminalisation is in transforming a curable sickness into an incurable cycle of crime, jail and despair - not to mention making out a £1bn annual cheque to crime syndicates.

But what’s really criminal about it is that the Jacqui Smiths of the world know this as well as the Professor Nutts - but their Governments are just too cowardly to confront the truth.

The wrong type of criminals

by Alan Tyers

You can say what you like about the Daily Mail, but its writers know how to push their punters’ buttons.

This headline is absolutely textbook: “How police are making criminals of the over-40s: Target culture fuels rise in first-time convictions for middle aged.”

It sits atop a classic Mail article: decent, middle-class people are being singled out for harassment by a nosy, arrogant regime of jobsworths who are only nicking them to meet their quotas.

Familiar bugbears - such as the “bin police”, and ordinary law-abiding sorts being punished for such “non-crimes” as speeding and refusing to wear a seat belt - all get a mention.

It’s the hypocrisy I like best: when it’s crimes that your typical Daily Mail reader might commit - speeding through a village, say - it’s the nanny state, Big Brother Is Watching You, a sickening assault on our rights as good stout British Yeoman, and not really a crime at all.

When it’s a non-Mail-reader crime - a puff of a spliff, say - then we should bring back the birch and teach these scum a lesson.

So which is it, Daily Mail hacks: rule of law, or “live and let live”?

Treat people ethically too

by Alan Tyers

Steven Barker, stepfather of Baby P, has forced animal rights charity People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (Peta) to take down a poster featuring a picture of him, on the grounds that it’s libellous.

The charity suggests that people who start off abusing animals go on to abuse humans, and indeed it does seem that various notorious killers did previously kill pets.

One factor in a libel case is that the victim’s standing is reduced in the eyes of reasonable people. Surely that boat has sailed for Barker? Could anybody in the world actually have had their opinion of him lowered by a poster?

That said, the original poster did call Barker a killer, and his lawyer points out that he was, in fact, found not guilty of murder.

Even scum like this get some protection from this country’s draconian libel laws, which probably seems crazy to a lot of people.

But it seems to me that Peta has shot itself in the foot a bit here. There can’t be anybody alive who didn’t already think that Barker was evil, but conflating his crimes with the mistreatment of animals seems a stretch of taste.

One struggle for animal rights charities is mainstream people thinking that they’re nutters who place animal life higher than human. Don’t campaigns like this reinforce that view a bit?

Cruelty to animals is bad and wrong, but it cannot be said to be as morally indefensible as killing a baby. Why would anyone even need to try to link the two?

Crazy for Jesus

by Alan Tyers

Leilani Neumann, 41, of Weston, Wisconsin, told the court: “We are not crazy religious people.” She and her husband were both sentenced to six months for second-degree reckless homicide.

They had let their 11-year-old daughter, Madeline, die on the floor while they prayed around her, certain their God would heal the child, refusing to get her medical attention.

Madeline, who suffered from an undiagnosed but treatable type of diabetes, had become so weak she could not speak or eat. She died on Sunday at the family home while her mum and dad and members of their Bible group prayed for her to be healed.

The first reaction is anger that anyone could be so incredibly stupid. It’s a great shame that people as dim as the Neumanns have managed to produce four offspring. The other three kids are presumably praying they don’t get ill.

Really, though, you just feel despair that in the 21st century, in the developed world, people are still in thrall to this sort of mumbo-jumbo. And don’t be saying: “Only in America…” We have our own religious nutters here, who think that decapitating their children for perceived infidelity is the way to go.

I met a woman recently whose husband has become estranged from his family, because he does not share their Jehovah’s Witness beliefs. The situation came to a head when he asked: “If, hypothetically, I were to be in a serious road accident and needed a transfusion, what would you do?”

His mother said: “I would not allow the doctors to give you a blood transfusion, because blood is sacred.”

Him: “So you would, effectively, be condemning me to death?”

Her: “But a death with JESUS.”

We’re trying to have a civilisation here. We have art and literature, and double helixes and heart transplants and iPhones; other people have praying over their dying kid. These people deserve punishment, not tolerance.

Prison break?

by Alan Tyers

The president of the Prison Governors Association is calling for sentences of less than a year to be scrapped. Good shout.

With prisoner numbers in England and Wales on the up - we hit 84,000 this August, a new record - Paul Tidball correctly points out that locking so many people up is becoming ruinously expensive.

Why, he rightly argues, are we banging up low-risk crooks - rather than reserving such prison space as we do have for the most dangerous members of society?

I would add that the depressing re-offending rates mean that putting people in prison is at best pointless and at worst dangerous. Nobody really expects any serious rehabilitation, do they?

And given that jails are what amounts to a university for criminals, aren’t moderate villains more likely to come out more hardened? To say nothing of the brutalisation and the knock-on effect on the crook’s unfortunate family.

Meanwhile, what about the deterrent effect of the prospect of prison? Well, to a certain sort of person, it’s just an occupational hazard.

Scrapping prison sentences for minor offenders is not going to encourage decent folk to suddenly start robbing from Superdrug. But it is going to free up space for more deserving villains.

Instead of expensive, pointless, harmful prison, petty criminals should be faced with serious, hugely inconvenient community work - which is much cheaper to administer and might even do some good.

Die in vein?

by Alan Tyers

Convicted murderer Romell Broom’s execution has been postponed because the Ohio death row authorities could not find a suitable vein into which to insert the lethal injection.

His lawyer said prison officials “had arrived at a point of diminishing returns and a point when further attempts are cruel and counterproductive”.

Never mind the mechanics of the killing – the whole business is cruel and counterproductive.

Broom was sentenced to death for the rape and murder of a 14-year-old girl: crimes that are indeed about as dastardly as it’s possible to imagine. The knee-jerk reaction is, quite justifiably, that he deserves to die.

Nevertheless, the legal process is sufficiently uncertain to make the death penalty unjustifiable.

Since 1973, 135 death row prisoners in America have been exonerated of their crimes and released. That’s 135 people who would have been unjustly condemned to death.

Even one wrongful execution should be enough reason to abolish the death penalty, but 135?

That’s the cruel; here’s the counterproductive. The deterrent argument is bogus: states without the death penalty have had consistently lower murder rates. In 2007, the murder rate in states without the death penalty was 4.1 per 100,000 people; in states with the death penalty, it was 5.83. Similar figures exist for each year back to 1990.

Erratic and pointless, there’s no justification for the death penalty other than society taking its revenge on the guilty party – assuming it all goes right.

Sword of justice

by Greg McDonald

The Somerset homeowner arrested for stabbing an intruder with an ornamental sword this weekend should not only be found innocent, but held up as a shining example of moral courage.

Yet shamefully English law has seen him held by police – and worse still, this case of a man finding himself up against the law for protecting his home is not an isolated one.

When Kevin McGilloway disturbed an armed burglar in March 2008, breaking the thief’s nose, you might think the police would have thanked the Londonderry resident for doing their job for them – but instead they asked the burglar whether he wanted to make a complaint.

Let’s be clear. Violence is always best avoided – and the sort of lawless vigilante thugs who this week tortured to death a man they mistook for a paedophile should rot behind bars.

But the moment a burglar crosses a home’s threshold, the situation is far simpler. Justice should be guided by a simple principle: the moment a criminal breaks into a house, or a pub brawler throws a potentially lethal right hook, any right to protection from the law is forfeited. I

Indeed, until the law sides with the innocent, not only does natural justice of the kind handed out in Somerset this week remain on the wrong side of the law – English law remains on the wrong side of justice.