Overall, these guidelines make for grim reading. The sentencing range for domestic burglary is now six years, up from the four year previously recommended by the Sentencing Advisory Panel, forerunner to the Sentencing Council.

The recommended range for non domestic burglary is now one to five years, compared with the originally proposed one to four years.

The post-riot sentencing backlash also continues. Among aggravating factors that might justify a longer sentence is the ‘context of general public disorder’.

In short, these new guidelines signal an ongoing toughening of sentencing. It seems that a falling, or merely stable, prison population remains a distant prospect.

On the 22nd July 1931 a group of concerned citizens met at a flat in Primrose Hill to establish an organisation. The purpose of this organisation was to promote the notion, backed by scientific research, that there were better ways of dealing with offenders than prison, and to translate this notion into action.

That organisation – the `Association for the Scientific Treatment of Criminals’ – was shortly to rename itself the `Institute for the Scientific Treatment of Delinquency’ and, in 1948, the `Institute for the Study and Treatment of Delinquency’. In 1999 it adopted its current name: the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies.

As we mark this our 80th year I want pay tribute to the vision and pioneering spirit of our founders: Grace Pailthorpe; Maurice Hamblin-Smith; David Eder; Edward Glover; James Hadfield; Ernest Jensen; Emanuel Miller, to name but a few.

I also want to celebrate the contribution of those members and supporters, trustees and staff, past and present whose collective endeavour has sustained us through the years and brought us to this important landmark.

As we mark our 80th year we note the end of old partnerships and celebrate the beginning of new ones. Last year we ended a near 30 year strategic partnership with King’s College London.

This year we are approaching the first anniversary of an exciting new strategic partnership with The Open University. There is a strong fit between The Open University’s commitment to opening up educational opportunities to all and our commitment to research and policy analysis in the public interest. I am confident that this partnership will stand the test of time.

As we celebrate our 80th year we also mark another important landmark in our history. After operating for many years out of borrowed offices we now operate from our own offices in Vauxhall, offices we bought earlier this year. This gives us a solid foundation as an organisation from which to build. We have ambitious plans to develop our new home as a hub of activity both for us and for all like-minded organisations and individuals over the coming years.

So what does the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies stand for in 2011? We are motivated by:

• A concern for social justice, grounded in rigorous research and the evidence-base.

• A belief in the power of big ideas to shape and foster change, matched by a practical concern to put these ideas into action.

• An optimism about the possibilities for real and lasting change, tempered by a realism in knowing that meaningful change is never certain and is often achieved over years and decades rather than weeks and months.

• A commitment to make trusted interventions, in the public interest, free from political or other corrupting influences.

Our approach is distinctive and innovative.

• Our focus is on social harm, not crime. Much that is harmful is not necessarily criminal. Our starting point is the full range of social harms, not the narrow range of those currently defined as crime.

• Our concern is more with scrutinising the workings and impact of the criminal justice process; less with working for the reform of the criminal justice system, though we have a healthy respect for reformist endeavours.

• Our interest is in multi-agency, holistic solutions to social problems rather than in finding new ways for the criminal justice system to solve problems it is generally ill-equipped to handle.

Our connections with those in the worlds of research and policy, practice and campaigning are very important to us. We all of us have a small part to play in shaping a better world. No organisation, however influential, however big, can embody this responsibility alone.

In other words, the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies is much more than the sum of its individual activities. It is a movement sustained by shared values, commitments and knowledge; expressed through its many initiatives, partnerships and collaborations.

We value the active contribution all of you in this room have made to our work, as well as the contributions made by those who could not join us tonight. If you want to play a less active role in the coming period do speak to me afterwards. I’ll talk you out of it! If you want to play a more active role in helping to shape our future than you currently do, we want to hear from you.

• If you are not currently a member, please do consider becoming one.

• If you do not receive our monthly email bulletin, do sign up. It will keep you updated on our plans and keep you abreast of developments across a broad range of criminal justice and social policy matters.

• If you would like to write an article for our magazine Criminal Justice Matters, or submit a blog for our website, we would be keen to hear your ideas.

• If you have an idea for an event, a report, a research project, a collaboration, a partnership, we want to speak to you.

• Come along to our future events. We are delighted that Susie Orbach has agreed to be our Eve Saville lecture speaker this November. I hope to see many of you there.

• Follow us on twitter and Facebook.

• You may even like to make a donation to our anniversary appeal.

As we celebrate our 80th birthday we acknowledge all those who have contributed so much. And we look to the future, strong in the belief that our best days are yet to come.

If today’s report has been more keenly anticipated this is partly because of concerns that the ongoing recession will result in rising crime rates.

So what does the report tell us? The authors are pretty clear on this point:

Some commentators have been expecting to see rises in acquisitive crime due to the recent recession and the related rise in unemployment. However, despite difficult economic conditions these latest statistics show no consistent evidence of upward pressure across the range of acquisitive crime (p.19).

The reference to a ‘the range of acquisitive crime’ is an important qualification. More on this in a moment. First, a few qualifications.

The statistics released today tell us many interesting things. They do not, however, offer a reliable source of information on all crime. The report authors are also clear on this point:

taking the broadest definition of crime, the main BCS and Recorded Crime statistics only cover a fraction of total criminal behaviour (p.23).

I made much the same argument some years ago and was rather taken to task for doing so by Labour ministers and their advisors at the time. It is good to see this basic and rather important point now being officially acknowledged.

The authors also point out that the ‘definition of crime itself is not as straightforward as may appear’ (p. 15). They do not argue that crime does not exist in a meaningful sense. There are good reasons for concluding this however, as I have previously argued.

These important qualifications made, the most striking statistic for me is the rise in homicide, up four percent from last year from 618 to 642 (p.17). Previous research by Professor Danny Dorling pointed to the strong correlation between recessions and increases in homicide rates. It is much too early to tell whether the rise highlighted today is part of a longer-term, and similar trend. But it is suggestive. And while today’s publication is relatively dismissive of talk of links between burglary and the recession, the apparent rise in levels after a number of years of falling trends may not be entirely coincidental.

Recessions can also cause harm in other ways. A letter to The Lancet last week pointed to the impact of the current recession on suicide rates. The impact of the recession and austerity on housing security, employability, poverty and health is also likely to be serious.

As is often the case with crime talk, a narrow focus on legally defined harms risks ignoring a much bigger, and ultimately more important, set of issues.

The title of this talk comes from a book published in 1994 called Thinking the Unthinkable. Starting in the 1930s, the book traces the intellectual resurgence and ultimate triumph of a set of economic principles now generally referred to as ‘neoliberalism’, or sometimes Thatcherism. As the author Richard Cockett writes in his introduction:

This is a study of an intellectual counter-revolution, tracing the development of an idea, forged in the 1930s…and the eventual translation of that idea into a coherent body of specific policy proposals and initiatives which governments could deploy in power… It was a conscious and, in the end, successful attempt to turn the tide of political and economic thinking in a particular direction.

The idea of neoliberalism came of age in the 1970s, some forty years after its birth in a very different world. The power of big ideas to shape opinion and inspire coalitions for change is often overlooked. The desire to achieve short-term policy gains can blind us to the fact that real change is sometimes measured in years and decades.

I want to start by reflecting a bit on that phrase: ‘thinking the unthinkable’.

In 1846, Karl Marx and Fredrich Engels offered the following – arguably unthinkable – vision of life under a very different set of social arrangements:

In communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner.

Marx and Engels’ vision is not unthinkable in a literal sense. They thought of it after all. We can think about it too and develop the implications behind it. Or not, as the case might be.

If Marx and Engels’ vision is ‘unthinkable’ it is so in a different sense.

Some may not find their vision a particularly attractive one. All that hunting, fishing, cattle rearing and criticising, Frances Wheen remarks in his biography of Marx, does sound rather exhausting.

Others might be strongly opposed to their vision on political grounds. They would consider the kind of society envisaged by Marx, Engels and those inspired by them as unthinkable because, to them, it is highly undesirable.

Others still may simply consider their vision utopian. Nice in theory; completely unrealistic in practice.

Consider another vision: that of the liberal political philosopher John Rawls. In his book Political Liberalism, published 150 years after Marx and Engels penned the words I just quoted, Rawls outlined the necessary institutional arrangements that in his view would allow citizens to participate in a society such as ours. In summary these were:

- Public financing of elections and the provision of genuinely impartial and independent information on policies to the electorate;
- Equality of opportunity to ensure that all citizens can partake of and contribute to public debate;
- A ‘decent’ distribution of income and wealth to ensure that all citizens can partake of basic liberal freedoms;
- Society as employer of last resort, to ensure that all citizens have the opportunity for meaningful work;
- Basic health care for all.

Many people, from across the political spectrum, would assent to some, if not all, of these propositions. They do not appear particularly utopian. Indeed as demands go they are rather modest. Yet given current political conditions and priorities, even Rawls’ modest list seems unachievable. At least in the short-term.

No idea is unthinkable in a literal sense. Ideas become unthinkable when placed in the context of our values and expectations, our political views, our moral outlook. We like some ideas. We dislike others. Some move and inspire us. Others dismay, even disgust us.

Ideas also become thinkable or unthinkable against the background of our lived experience and our judgements about what is possible and impossible, realistic or utopian. There is a social context to the thinkability of ideas. Ideas do not exist in the abstract.

What of the other part of my title: ‘alternative strategies for the future’?

These strategies must be an alternative to those of the coalition government. If not, to what are they the alternative? On criminal justice there is little to choose between the coalition government and the Labour opposition. The strategies we must consider are therefore alternatives to those offered by the Westminster parties as a whole, not just the government.

There follows the risk that these alternative strategies may be considered irrelevant to mainstream and current policy agendas. This is a necessary risk, inherent to any endeavour aimed at transforming the existing order of things, rather than merely modifying and tweaking it.

We are engaged in a version of what Alex Callinicos, in his 2006 book The Resources of Critique, describes as ‘transcendence’. This is not transcendence in a theological sense. To quote Callinicos:

Transcendence in the sense in which I am interested in it embraces a particular innovation in the social, political, and intellectual realms. How are we able to go beyond the limits set by existing practices and beliefs and produce something new?

Our challenge is to transcend the seeming solidity of existing criminal justice institutions and practices; the enervating inertia of the Westminster and Whitehall policy machines. We must guard against setting our sights too low in the misguided attempt of appearing ‘relevant’ to current concerns. And if we do set our sights high, we must be clear also about what might be involved in achieving our ambitions.

I now want to develop this argument in relation to criminal justice.

In 2009, the courts in England and Wales handed out 100,000 prison sentences. They handed out another 200,000 community sentences and nearly one million fines. 170,000 penalty notices for disorder were imposed, as were some 300,000 cautions.

Around 1.4 million people were found guilty in the courts last year. A total of 1.8 million appeared as defendants. The police carried out 1.3 million stops and searches. In a further 2.2 million cases individuals were stopped by the police and asked to account for themselves.

Daily the criminal justice system sifts and sorts, manages and oversees hundreds of thousands of people. Millions find their lives affected by it directly every year. Indirectly it touches the lives of millions more.

What should be the response to this? What agenda should we set for ourselves?

One response is to defend the interests of those subject to criminal justice capture and to advance the cause of criminal justice reform, step by incremental step. This has been the historic mission of reformers. There have been notable achievements and successes.

There have also been many disappointments. Under the last Labour government the cause of criminal justice reform ground to a halt. Indeed it slammed into reverse as Labour greatly increased criminal justice budgets, expanded the system’s reach and enhanced its grip. As the comedian Linda Smith once said, ‘I never expected much from New Labour, but even I was disappointed’.

The Conservative-Liberal coalition looks set to continue many of the policies it inherited from Labour. The emphasis may change in some respects. Innovative means of achieving policy objectives will emerge. The overall direction of travel will probably remain the same.

The reformers’ historic mission – defending those subject to criminal justice capture; eking out important reforms; resisting bad policy; championing fundamental values and principles – remains as necessary today as it ever was. It is also not enough.

At its best, the reformist approach might identify a practical solution to a pressing criminal justice problem for legislators to implement. Or champion a seemingly unpopular cause – votes for prisoners for instances – making, and sometimes winning, the argument. Or defend an important principle – the right to legal representation perhaps – in the face of attempts to undermine it.

Its starting point is the criminal justice system as it is, seeking to turn it into the criminal justice system as it ought to be. This is also its weakness.

Reformism operates within the limits set by existing practices and beliefs, rather than seeking to transcend them. It assumes as given certain beliefs: that crime exists as an objective category independent of social description; that those who commit crime are offenders. It assumes as given the existence of the criminal justice system as the natural institutional response to crime and offending. It assumes as given certain practices – the policing function, the probation service, the prison, the courtroom – as the appropriate and necessary basis for a society’s response to the problem of crime and offending.

To make itself relevant to the concerns of the Westminster village, the media and public debate, reformism has necessarily had to define the terrain of the thinkable in this way. As a result it cannot allow itself to think the unthinkable.

We do not have to limit ourselves to a discussion of how the criminal justice system might be different. We can also discuss how the criminal justice system might be transcended.

To think the unthinkable about criminal justice means thinking beyond existing institutional arrangements, certain commonsense assumptions and beliefs. It means developing a blueprint for change capable of inspiring a new generation of activists and organisers. It is avowedly not about pulling together a set of demands on criminal justice for the current crop of administrators and managers to implement.

The starting point involves rethinking some basic assumptions:

- on criminal justice,
- on so-called ‘offenders’, and
- on so-called ‘crime’.

I will discuss each of these in turn before drawing together their implications.

Viewed from certain standpoint, society has the appearance of a chain of regulatory relationships. Timetables regulate the movement of trains around the country. The doctor-patient relationship regulates the wellbeing of those in need of health care and treatment. The teacher and the school regulate the education of children and young people.

The criminal justice system is another example. It regulates certain social conflicts through the legal form. This was a point made by the Soviet legal theorist Evgeny Pashukanis in his 1924 book, The General Theory of Law and Marxism. Pashukanis found out to his own cost just how unyielding the legal form can be. He was executed as an enemy of the state by Stalinist goons following a show trial in 1937.

According to Pashukanis the law ‘represents the mystified form of a specific social relation’. To put the point more precisely, ‘under certain conditions the regulation of social relations assumes a legal character’. These ‘certain conditions’, argues Pashukanis, are the social antagonisms of class-based capitalist societies marked by profound inequalities of wealth and power. To quote Pashukanis:

Human conduct can be regulated by the most complex regulations, but the juridical factor in this regulation arises at the point when differentiation and opposition of interests begin.

So it is that the criminal justice system tends towards regulating the activities of certain socially selected individuals: predominantly fractions of the working class; mostly male. It does not regulate all offenders or all crime, or at least does not do so equally.

The particular social relationships that assume a legal form are the conflicts accorded the status of ‘crime’. The perpetrators of such acts are accorded the status of ‘offenders’. These terms – crime and offender – are the means by which conflicts that are the product of social processes are simplified and abstracted from their social context to fit with the logic of criminal justice.

This point is made in more concrete terms by Dave Whyte in a recent article in Criminal Justice Matters. To quote from his article:

In criminal procedure motive may come into the picture during a police investigation or where the prosecution establish the events leading to the crime. It may also feature in judicial sentencing. But motive is immaterial in establishing criminal guilt. The reason that criminal law developed this principle is simple: the law needed to resolve the contradiction between the equality it was supposed to uphold in the courtroom and the inequality that increasingly threatened the social order outside the courtroom. Had motive not been fenced off in this way, a motive of alleviating poverty or hunger could mitigate the crime of theft. How, then, might a hungry poor person have been jailed or transported to Australia for theft of food? Indeed, were poverty or other social circumstances to feature in a test of guilt today, some of our prisons would be close to empty.

In summary:

1. The regulation of certain social relationships marked by conflict assumes a legal form in societies such as ours.
2. This legal form finds its practical application in the operation of the criminal justice system.
3. ‘Crime’ and the ‘offender’ are the means by which an array of acts and happenings become the legitimate object of criminal justice practices.
4. This is possible because these acts and happenings are abstracted from the social context of their causes and origins.
5. The logic of criminal justice therefore represents a radical simplification and reduction of a complex range of social processes into a form that makes it open to a narrow set of bureaucratic processes.

An agenda that starts by asking how criminal justice can be reformed will tend to accept uncritically the very assumptions and beliefs that need to be questioned. If we are to think the unthinkable in relation to criminal justice we must start by unpacking the commonsense assumptions and beliefs about criminal justice. ‘Crime’ and ‘offenders’; the operation of the criminal justice process: these are the existing practices and beliefs we should seek to transcend if we are to produce something genuinely new.

We will all have different ideas of what would be involved in developing an alternative strategy to do this. For me these should include the following:

1. A rethink of the current governmental structures of criminal justice: the Home Office and Ministry of Justice. Where should the so-called ‘problem of crime’ be located at a ministerial level?
2. A rethink of the basic institutional structures of criminal justice: the police and prosecution authorities; prisons and probation. What is the purpose of the police; do we need a police force at all? Should we be trying to reduce the prison population or abolish prisons altogether?
3. The development of holistic institutional responses of the scale, scope and impact appropriate to the nature of the problem. These might include displacing criminal justice responses with health, housing, employment and educational ones, for instance.
4. Locating such an agenda within a coherent analysis of the nature and origin of social conflicts currently subject to criminal justice regulation. What is it about societies such as ours, for instance, that produce such unequal outcomes in terms of wealth and power? What can be done about this at a society-wide level?

These are big questions and a big agenda. It is the agenda we should be in the business of developing if we are to start thinking the unthinkable.

However, I did have a chance to knock the following piece yesterday for The Guardian. It’s on page 28 of today’s print edition and online here.

In what has become a febrile political climate, a 50% discount on sentences for people making early guilty pleas was never going to be an easy sell. Ken Clarke did not help his cause by getting into an argument over rape on BBC Radio 5 Live last month. As is sometimes the case with the justice secretary, an engaging, if blokeish, self-confidence comes across as arrogance or complacency.

But the demise of a relatively modest bureaucratic fix offers some insight into the scope, or rather the lack of scope, for anything approaching a serious and meaningful agenda for reform of our prisons. The prime minister’s intervention today, in which he disinterred the hoary old chestnut of householders using “reasonable force” to defend their property, signals the beginning of a return of a more traditional Tory law and order agenda.

A discount on early guilty pleas was a weak policy on which to make an apparently reformist stand. How to distinguish between early pleas as a result of overwhelming evidence of guilt and those where the defendant might have some hope of acquittal was never really clarified. And what of the perverse incentive – not to speak of the rank injustice – of innocent defendants pleading guilty for fear of a far more significant sentence if a court finds them guilty at a later point?

An upfront and generous sentencing discount also challenges important principles of the justice process itself. Behind the argument about discounts for rapists and muggers lies a more fundamental question about how criminal justice operates and how those suspected of perpetrating serious harms are dealt with. It was not just the tabloid press and the lock ‘em up fraternity that felt queasy at the prospect of men who had sexually molested women being given a much more lenient sentence for admitting culpability early on. Cost considerations also figured strongly in the argument, which made it easier for opponents to dismiss the proposals as mere pragmatism. There was no obvious principle at stake apart from a self-imposed need to save money.

Where this leaves Clarke is anybody’s guess. Of more import is the agenda for prison reform in the coming period. At the time of Clarke’s speech last year to the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies hopes were high among reformers. The “Clarke spring” beckoned. The pressure of spending cuts to be made would force ministers to embrace unpalatable and radical options, so the argument went. In practice ministers have tended to focus on the cost-cutting agenda before anything else. Small steps down the reformist road have not resulted in any meaningful change.

This stuttering progress comes at the same time as big changes are unfolding in the reform lobby. Some of the more recognisable household names have spent much of the past year positioning themselves to bid for contracts in the brave new world of payment by results in partnership with the private sector. Others are facing unprecedented financial pressures as these emergent financing structures challenge traditional ways of operating.

What is missing as all this manoeuvring continues is a coherent vision for what might be involved in genuine prison reform, and how this might be achieved. A vibrant reform sector, free from financial dependence on government, focused on the evidence base, confident about articulating a vision for change, unafraid of challenging ministers and their advisers, is what is needed to break the logjam.

That so many reformists invested so much in defending and championing a minor and uninspiring bureaucratic tweak to sentencing policy says much about the state of the current debate, and signals how much needs to change.

As part of that I have been thinking about why it is that we find it so difficult to look beyond the label when it comes to individuals subject to criminal justice capture. They are inmates or prisoners, offenders and criminals. Rarely more.

Last December’s issue of cjm carried a discussion on the language of criminal justice. It included an eloquent piece by Frances Crook of The Howard League on why the term ‘offender’ mystifies more than it informs. To quote from her article:

For too long it has been easy for politicians to treat certain sections of the population as ‘other’, implying that they are less than human. Insulting labels that define the action or illness as if it defines the whole person inhibit that individual from confronting the problem and moving on; just as importantly, the label prevents us from understanding as it becomes all we see…

Someone who commits an offence is not an offender; they are someone who has done something. The action does not define the whole person. They may also do good things and they will certainly fit into other categories that can offer a different definition like parent or friend. By insisting that the offence overcomes all other parts of the person we are condemning them to a sub-human category for whom there is no hope.

The full piece can be accessed here. All very relevant given the rather dysfunctional ‘debate’ about voting rights for those locked up in our prisons.

I thought it innocuous stuff: a gentle canter round a standard criminological debate knocked out one afternoon. Much that is harmful is not necessarily criminal, I pointed out. Much that is criminalised is also not particularly harmful. The aim of policy, I concluded, should be to address harms, whether defined as crime or not.

I received a number of positive reactions. But not from Policy Exchange, the self-styled ‘think tank for the new politics’ that claims to be ‘research-led and evidence-based’. An email bulletin they put out last week included the following:

And lastly, posing the question “Does Crime Exist?”, the academic Richard Garside from the Centre for Crime & Justice (CCJS) has a bizarre, and slightly disturbing take in Criminal Justice Matters.

I’m not an academic and I’ve certainly been called worse. But I am curious to know what it was about the piece that so concerned the wonks at Policy Exchange. I’ve emailed them to ask. So far no reply has been forthcoming.

How, er, bizarre.

Professor Andrew Sanders of the University of Birmingham warns that one third of the prison population is likely to be serving indefinite prison sentences by 2012. His concerns are shared by the President of the Prison Governors Association Eoin McLennan-Murray, who describes the Indeterminate Sentence for Public Protection as a `stain on our criminal justice system’ that has left an `indelible scar on the prison service’. McLennan-Murray also critiques the original structure of Labour’s National Offender Management Service as `a dysfunctional duplicate of already large prison service headquarters’ that has been `very successful at increasing the level of bureaucracy’.

Professor Andrew Ashworth of the University of Oxford also expresses concern about Indeterminate Sentences for Public Protection, describing them as `a policy-making disaster’. He calls on the coalition to undertake some `fundamental re-thinking’ on sentencing. This should include a reassessment of the roles of the police, Crown Prosecution Service and magistrates’ courts; a reaffirmation of the right to a fair trial; a re-examination of justifications for the UK’s high imprisonment rate and a commitment to evidence-based policy.

On the coalition’s plans for a `rehabilitation revolution’, David Faulkner, a former senior Home Office civil servant, argues that `no connection have been made between the “rehabilitation revolution” and the social conditions… which would enable it to take place, including the consequences which might follow from the government’s programmes in other areas of social policy such as employment, housing and support for families’. Faulkner goes on to argue that `one of the test for the coalition government… will be the extent to which it can bring together the political vision of a “big society” and the professional and managerial wisdom that is needed to “make things work”‘.

Other contributions to Lessons for the coalition include:

Professor Rod Morgan, former chair of the Youth Justice Board, who predicts that `cut-backs in “law and order” expenditure during the period 2011-2014 will almost certainly see a continuation of, possibly an increase in, the policy of imposing criminal sanctions out-of-court by the police and CPS’.
Dr Annette Ballinger of Keele University concludes that Labour’s initiatives on violence against women were failures `leaving women exposed to unchallenged and unchecked male violence’.
On control orders Professor Andrew Sanders argues that in most cases they have been used to disrupt `groups with only the most speculative and tangential relationship with terrorism’.
Professor Tim Hope of the University of Salford argues that Labour’s `achievement with the crime trend has been less to do with its efforts and more to do with its skill in rigging the examination system’.
Professor Reece Walters of The Open University argues that `the so-called environmental successes under New Labour are already threatened by the proposals of the coalition… where environmental issues, such as green house gas emissions have been overshadowed by economic recovery and fiscal restraint’.

Other contributors look at a range of areas, including corporate homicide, victims policy, drugs policy and the probation service.

So I was intrigued to come across a new report by the RAC Foundation, on what it euphemistically calls ‘Road Sharing‘. As most cyclists would point out, one rarely feels as if one is ‘sharing’ the road with motorists. Toleration perhaps. Sharing? No.

In his Foreword to the report the Foundation’s director Stephen Glaister poses the following question:

Some rivalries are enduring. Manchester United fans despise Manchester City fans. Die-hard Labour supporters cannot abide Conservatives. And it seems many car drivers loathe cyclists – a feeling which is often mutual.

Why is this so? Why do drivers consider the typical cyclist to be reckless and by the same token cyclists view ‘the motorist’ as inconsiderate and malicious?

There’s some interesting analysis in the pages that follow, not least of all examples of frankly dangerous attitudes by motorists towards cyclists:

When drivers encounter cyclists in circumstances that cause them to slow or deviate… their estimation of the cyclist’s discourtesy increases, regardless of the cyclist’s actual behaviour.

I wonder how many cyclists are injured or killed every year as a result of this particular kind of boneheadedness?

And that points to one of the problems with this report. It treats ‘road sharing’ between cyclists and motorists as a level playing field, which it clearly is not. One group balances, slightly precariously, on top of a few bits of metal and rubber. The other group mostly sits cocooned inside an urban tank with very hard edges, when it is not sitting astride a throbbing chunk of metal with the acceleration of a passenger plane. I have been in a few collisions with fellow cyclists to no long-term ill effect. I really wouldn’t want to collide with a motorist.

The unequal outcomes from this unlevel playing field are clear from the road death figures. Here are the figures for 2009, taken from Table 5.19 of the 2009 Mortality Statistics:

Cyclists killed by motorists: 61
Motorists killed by cyclists: 0

This concrete reality of the unequal battle for space waged everyday between cyclists and motorists should be the starting point of any discussion. If cyclists do sometimes consider motorists ‘inconsiderate and malicious’ that’s because they sometimes are, and with deadly consequences.

One of the three – medieval Lancaster Castle – is a fine historic monument. It is hardly a fit place to house prisoners in the twenty first century. Another, Ashwell, is a semi-ruin after being extensively damaged in a riot last year. The third, Morton Hall, is being turned into an immigration detention centre. A change of purpose perhaps but people will still be detained there against their will. These were, in other words relatively easy decisions to make. It hardly feels like the beginnings of a brave new world of decarceration.

Stepping back from the immediate question of the prison population, what is going on here? Alan Travis points out in The Guardian that places in immigration detention are set to expand by some 3,500 places. This more than outweighs the modest reduction of prison places announced yesterday. It is greater too than the planned reduction of 3,000 prison places by 2014.

Then there are the latest figures on compulsory detention under the Mental Health Act. Fighting Monsters highlights the quite staggering 30 percent increase in detentions between 2008/09 and 2009/10, from 32,649 to 42,479. Are we witnessing a displacement from prisons into other custodial settings?

More than 200,000 people are locked up against their will in prison, immigration detention or police custody in the UK in any given year. The possible movement between these different settings deserves more attention that it currently gets. It is entirely possible that we will witness a fall in prison capacity and prison numbers, while seeing a rise in the overall incarcerated population. While reformers celebrate small victories on prison capacity, they would do well to remember that there are various ways in which individuals can be deprived of their liberty.