A Little Bit On Britain

[Aughnanure]

Real Crime, Fake Justice

Theodore Dalrymple

Summer 2006 http://www.city-journal.org/printable.php?id=2054

For the last 40 years, government policy in Britain, de facto if not always de jure, has been to render the British population virtually defenseless against criminals and criminality. Almost alone of British government policies, this one has been supremely effective: no Briton nowadays goes many hours without wondering how to avoid being victimized by a criminal intent on theft, burglary, or violence.

None of these revelations, however, would have surprised a man called David Fraser, who has just published a book entitled A Land Fit for Criminals—the land in question being Great Britain, of course. Far from being mistakes—for mistakes repeated so often cease to be mere mistakes—all these occurrences are in full compliance with general policy in Britain with regard to crime and criminality.

Fraser was a probation officer for more than a quarter of a century. He began to doubt the value of his work in terms of preventing crime and therefore protecting the public, but he at first assumed that, as a comparatively lowly official in the criminal-justice system, he was too mired in the grainy everyday detail to see the bigger picture. He assumed also that those in charge not only knew what they were doing but had the public interest at heart.

Eventually, however, the penny dropped. Fraser’s lack of success in effecting any change in the criminals under his supervision, and thus in reducing the number of crimes that they subsequently committed, to the great misery of the general public, was not his failure alone but was general throughout the system. Even worse, he discovered that the bureaucrats who ran the system, and their political masters, did not care about this failure, at least from the point of view of its impact on public safety; careerist to the core, they were only concerned that the public should not become aware of the catastrophe. To this end, they indulged in obfuscation, statistical legerdemain, and outright lies in order to prevent the calamity that public knowledge of the truth would represent for them and their careers.

The collective intellectual dishonesty of those who worked in the system so outraged Fraser—and the Kafkaesque world in which he found himself, where nothing was called by its real name and language tended more to conceal meaning than to convey it, so exasperated him—that, though not a man apt to obtrude upon the public, he determined to write a book. It took him two and a half years to do so, based on 20 years of research, and it is clear from the very first page that he wrote it from a burning need to expose and exorcise the lies and evasions with which he lived for so long, lies and evasions that helped in a few decades transform a law-abiding country with a reputation for civility into the country with the highest crime rate in the Western world, with an ever-present undercurrent of violence in daily life. Like Luther, Fraser could not but speak out. And, as events unfolded, his book has had a publishing history that is additionally revealing of the state of Britain today.

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Excellent article. follow the link; Theodore Dalrymple was a doctor in the prison system for years and knows what he is writing about.

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Why aren't I surprised?

[dhtaxi]

He is only putting into print what the majority of people in the UK all ready know the justice system in this country does not work there is no deterent and the criminal ellement know this.

To day a young man in my local court was sentenced to 3 years for stealing a car and killing a 6 year old child whilst driving the car with no licence no insurance etc. He will be lucky to serve 2 year of the sentence.The driver had a list of previous convictions as long as your arm.

How does this make the dead childs parents think