SENTENCING

THE KILLER OF head teacher Phillip Lawrence, Learco Chindamo (now 29), was released last Thursday after serving a 14 year sentence. His release reopens the debate about sentencing murderers in this country for what is after all, the ultimate crime. There are currently 4500 offenders serving terms for murder who are due to become eligible for parole; while, out of a prison population of nearly 90,000, there are only 38 convicted murderers who are actually serving life in the truest meaning of the term, and will never be eligible for parole - though this does not stop them trying, as we saw last week, when the ‘Yorkshire Ripper’ failed in his attempt to secure such eligibility.

When the last person to face capital punishment was hung in 1964, the ultimate penalty was replaced by the life sentence, and everybody at the time was given to believe that life was meant to mean life. If, at the time, it had meant anything less, then the people would not have gone along with it and ‘progressive’ politics would have been stifled at birth

Since the change in the law we have been on a slippery slope of ‘progressive’ sentencing. Our politicians’ have always provided the hard line rhetoric on sentencing to cover their tracks with the electorate. But their forked tongues have always been betrayed by the reality of everyday life experienced by those living on our crime-ridden inner city estates.

There is, and have always been, a great divide between our legislators, prosecutors, lawyers and judges, and the ordinary people who cope with their decisions on a daily basis.

Last week, for instance Andrew Bridges, the chief inspector of probation had the audacity to suggest that prison was a, “rather drastic form of crime prevention”. With these people on their side, is it little wonder that the criminal population have little to fear from the criminal justice system.

The criminal justice system is indeed something to be feared for the law abiding, to whom a prison cell is a hell hole never to be endured; but for the recidivist criminal it holds no fears, especially in the modern age of human rights. For such people life in our modern prisons may be hard but far from unbearably so.

CRIME ALWAYS COMES near the top of the list after immigration as far as the of British people are concerned. On top of which poll after poll has shown that a majority exists within this country for the reintroduction of capital punishment.

This shows how far apart the politicians and the legal classes are from the people they are supposed to serve. In truth our politician’s regard the people’s support for capital punishment as a kind of atavistic response which they hope to bury once and for all as the generations pass by, and a more civilised European ‘cafe-culture’ replaces it. Which is why, no doubt, our politician’s so readily signed up to European human rights governance over our own law making.

Learco Chindamo is a product of such a system. He has paid his price to society and is therefore free to live once more among the free. But the price he was asked to pay was insufficient for the crime he committed. The price he was asked to pay by our judicial system, working quite rightly in accordance with laws passed by our parliament and the European Court of Human Rights, was pitiful in the extreme.

Since the 1960s we have created a liberal monolith that even Samuel Butler, the author of Erewhon would have found incredible. Today this monolith of progressiveness has exceeded the boundaries of normality and is becoming part of the extreme at the leftward end of the political spectrum.

The first duty of any democratic country is to provide security for its people, if it fails in this then the people are at liberty to challenge their government. But if democratic challenges only results in more of the same, then, as in the USA, the people should have the right to bear arms in their own defence.

IF SOMEONE KILLS ANOTHER human being then the length of their sentence should not be determined by any parole system given to them by some judge who sentences them to the least…whatever.

We live in an age where the criminal takes precedence over the victim. Reform of the perpetrator of crime now seems to take precedence over the feelings of their victims . It appears that no matter what the criminal has done, the Christian ethic of redemption seems to take priority.

If our prison population is to decline then we have to make its residency unpopular for the recidivist criminal. As things stand at the moment, the prison population is far better protected than those of us law abiding citizens who live on the outside.

Our values appear wrong. The Left, who have more or less governed our society since the early 1960s at every level, have managed to produce this distorted morality; and they should take full blame for its outcome.