Dirty work

These are strange times; we have members of parliament on trial and being sentenced, we have an A-level student receiving a lengthy custodial sentence, and we have government speaking of fewer prisoners and closer to home rehabilitation in sentencing. We also have the dawn of minimum pricing for alcohol. And we have a new era for publicly funded work and anxiety over the survival of the referral profession. Like the healthcare system, shake-ups and new structures are being introduced and nobody really knows how they are going to work.

By January next year we may all be tendering for publicly funded work and be arranging police station cover and magistrate court representation and crunching through the financial numbers ourselves. We might all become management consultants, and speaking of margins and cost/benefit ratios and other such alien things. Perhaps we shall all start being very severe about costs and start to 'drive down' the cost of appearances and conferences; perhaps we shall even end up being harder on ourselves than government paymasters have been hitherto.

The difficulty of course is that we have no laws of supply and demand, or competitiveness, or emerging markets. Like doctors and nurses, and paramedics and physiotherapists, we have no control over who we see and how many people that may be. We cannot go out and promote a new crime wave in a certain field '“ fraud say, always quite well paid, or market to England's finest the idea of a nice riot and criminal damage enterprise so that we can pick up some fees. Nor of course can doctors go and poison the nearest local water supply to drum up a bit of business in the gastric market.

Rather like doctors and nurses, we are actually quite keen on things that take our living away. Any criminal lawyer, when he or she stops to think about it, knows that lots of crime is a bad thing, and a lot less crime is a good thing. Of course that spells trouble if we find that some new non-custodial measure is actually working, and so that all those repeat customers are suddenly no longer shopping with us, but shopping with the educationalists or the construction department, and paying tax and national insurance to the revenue department instead of putting a bill in for us.

Doctors and nurses are very keen on prevention and lifestyle measures. This means makers of trainers and owners of gyms are doing well, but in theory the clinicians are going to be doing themselves out of a job.

Does anybody else have this problem? Teachers can encourage literacy and education and help to keep themselves in jobs, farmers will always have people to feed and water, and civil servants will have people to administrate. We, however, would find a criminal-less society a bit of a bother.

Putting the brakes on

But never mind '“ it seems obvious to start minimum alcohol pricing to bring some sort of brake to the drunken violence. On how many times on a busy sentencing Friday does the judge hear that excess alcohol is 'not mitigation, but an explanation Your Honour'? So much mitigation involves expressions of bewildered shame, regret and embarrass-ment that exuberance has crossed the line into mindless yobbery.

All of our city centres and town centres are afflicted to some degree or other, all of our hospital A&E departments have to clear up afterwards, and booze is the most common factor behind most emergency attendances over the weekend. It would be an interesting survey to carry out among prisoners as to how many of them were in custody solely because they had several too many.

In the same way that minimum alcohol pricing is a good thing, education, maintaining family ties and avoiding custody for most young people must all be laudable aims for young offenders. The unsung heroes and heroines of the prison system are the probation officers who teach in prisons, teaching such basic things as how to fill in a job application form online, and how to behave in a job interview. Again, if they are really successful at what they do then they too will see their success turned into personal disaster.

Broken promises

For anybody at an early stage contemplating a life in crime, the situation will become even more acute. I don't know how many students graduate with a professional (Bar or solicitors) qualification each year '“ but how on earth they are all going to find jobs is already beyond me. Each year another big batch of highly qualified and keen as mustard bright young heavily indebted young people enter the job or training market from the numerous law schools around the country. We cannot hope to employ them all, or give them all careers. They are fighting tooth and nail just to be a paralegal, or to do mini-pupillages. We need to think about whether we are guilty of fraudulent trading if we promise so much to so many when there are so few spaces.

So curious times ahead '“ there are stirrings that might, just might, bring about seismic shifts in the way criminality is prevented and dealt with; there may be seismic shifts in the way we shall be funded and how we are funded '“ and, ironically, we could find that we are needed a little less.

Mind you, if that means I can go out on Saturday night and get back to my car safely without being assaulted, accosted or vomited on, even though the future looks financially stormy, every cloud really does have a silver lining.