Strictly come sentencing
Felix ponders the merits of scoring criminals
What is it about piers? No not the posh chaps, the ones that stick out into the sea. They keep burning down! Southend, Brighton, and now Hastings. What is going on?
Not that I can see the point of them myself '“ it all looks rather windy and wet. I don't want a tattoo or candyfloss, and yes they may well be great feats of Victorian ironwork and so on but aren't they really a testimony to an age when, frankly, life was pretty grim and going to the seaside and not being able to swim or get your kit off meant that strolling along the prom and out to sea on the pier was a truly wonderful and invigorating adventure? Now we have rollercoasters and jet skis and nudist beaches. Do we really need piers?
Perhaps there is a serial arsonist out there whose mission in life is to destroy these things '“ rather than the sadly prosaic reality that it is to do with electrical fires or other such mundane things. Arson is a peculiar thing and something that automatically gets the criminal courts thinking very carefully right from the off.
I recall that one trait of the arsonist can be to hang around a watch the fire brigade arrive and put out what you started. That in a way sums it up '“ not many other criminals hang around at the scene of the crime to enjoy it. Bank robbers are dutifully doing numerous car switches and shouting things like 'Put your foot down, Smiler!' burglars are off over the fence and heading for their dealer, and violent types are busy running away while somebody shouts 'Leave 'im Charlie he ain't worth it!' and worrying about CCTV and the whole business of alibis.
Arson is obviously a mental health issue. It is also very unsettling as the reality is that this defendant with a box of matches and 30 unsupervised seconds might just cause the most incredible damage to life, limb and property totally out of the blue. So no wonder the atmosphere changes in court when arson is on the indictment.
Know the score
Arson then is a good reason why we do not have sentencing conducted by the general public. From piers to peers '“ we could have a system in place that would borrow well from (hooray it's back) Strictly Come Dancing.
The best bit of Strictly (apart from Brucie) is the scoring. After a lot of close analysis about technique the four judges get to hold up large lollipops with their score on. Len Goodman has made this his thing by the particular way he says 'seven'. It is a sort of calling out across a crowded room with an inflection on the second syllable that is all his own. We love it.
Just imagine if sentencing was done in the same way. First, of course, we would have the offence (the dance) and the mitigation (being interviewed by Brucie about how they feel it went: 'Well, do you really think you should have hit him?' Answer: 'I feel very ashamed '“ I've worked so hard on anger management in training and I've a job starting Monday and my girlfriend is pregnant with quads') and then we would have the judging. Great stuff: 'I liked the way you got over the wall, and using false plates on the van was a good start, but darling going through the red light was just bound to attract unwanted attention from the boys in blue; and as for leaving your DNA all over the crime scene '“ well!'
Then we would come on to the sentencing and the judges would hold up their scores and if it was really serious somebody could shout out 'Se- VERNNN!! YEARS!!' And then at the end it would be on the sofas in the cells with Tess and everybody saying how gutted they would not be coming back next week.
Bursting point
As a nation we are tough sentencers. The general public thinks we should have more prisons and that anything less than porridge is an insult. Get the public sentencing (maximum ten on the lollipop '“ but that could still get you 40 years) and the jails would be full to bursting point.
So would this Strictly Come Sentencing be a deterrent? Who knows? Well, we do. And no, it would not. Banging them up means we just keep banging them up. However, exciting news in the last few days was how effective drug rehab sentences appear to be in terms of long-term recidivism rates.
It is a longhaul, admittedly, but people are getting there. And Kenneth Clarke says that short sentences are a waste of time and resources and we need to do much more work of all sorts in prisons with prisoners.
This could mean that it isn't just arson that gets our serious hats on, but pretty much everything. Imagine a criminal justice system like that '“ peerless, just like our seaside.