Starting young

Operation Bumblebee is back: all over the Tube there are adverts telling would-be burglars that the Metropolitan Police has re-launched the burglar-busting initiative, and, if they have any sense at all, they should not be welcoming these darkening evenings as a heaven-sent opportunity to go out burgling, but rather see it as a time to draw up an armchair by a warm fire and have a quiet night in, reminisce about the old days and get an early night. We, the householders, are invited to defeat the threat posed by those who ignore the warnings and prefer to wander from their firesides on autumn evenings by leaving our lights on. The burglars '“ well, most of them '“ understandably do not want to risk burgling a house where the occupier is at home, and so they will either move on to find an easier target or just go back home, rattle the coals and say 'nothing doing' to Mrs Burglar.

It can't be easy being in government, because in this case to defeat the burglars we have to contribute to global warming. On the one hand we are being urged to switch everything off and on the other hand we are urged to leave everything on. Perhaps the real answer is to not bother having things like dvd players and other high-value easily convertible to cash possessions, because then we would not be wrecking the environment and the burglars would give up and take up something useful '“ like conservation work, for example.

On another level, there are serious contradictions which are a real policy nightmare to solve. The classic is the use of prison. It seems to be understood now that a large percentage of crime is caused by a small percentage of offenders. The argument for longer prison sentences is to reduce offending not by rehabilitation, but by simply incapacitating the offenders from being able to commit crime at all because they are locked up and out of the way. For the violent offenders '“ the sort of people who ruin other people's lives by committing random acts of violence on perfectly innocent people in the name of drink-fuelled sport or a misguided understanding of the meaning of 'respect' '“ we can afford to be liberal until it occurs to us that a few more months away may mean that a few less people's faces (and lives) have been rearranged by the man prone to violence.

So, it really comes down to root causes. We have a very angry attitude to offending: we pass long sentences on young people; we are said to be the harshest on our young people and those who commit crimes generally than most other European countries. Again and again what is obvious is that root causes provide the factory for offending. An article in the The Guardian the other day concerned a group of lads on a London estate who professed that they were keen to get to Feltham Young Offenders Institution because it was a cross between a holiday, a form of graduation, and a centre of learning '“ criminal learning, that is. Apparently, for some of the girls around the estate, the fact that the boy has been away to Feltham gives him the appeal that other poor law-abiding saps just don't have.

Turning it around

So, what does it take to turn any of this around? Again, The Guardian interviewed a worker who acted as a father figure to the boys, and was somebody who could talk to them and they could respect. It is impossible to imagine how far some of the gang might have gone without his restraining influence. But it is all very depressing; after all, surely every child is born without a scowl or a desire to get tooled up with a blade. Most children are born trusting, happy and interested. We need to keep them that way.

The real way '“ the only way '“ to reduce crime is to invest at the youngest ages possible. Children can be damaged by the age of three; some research suggests that they can be damaged before they are even born if the mother is living in an abusive, neglectful environment. Feltham should not be seen as a degree; respect should be understood to mean mutual respect, not dominance.

Only intensive resourcing at the earliest stages '“ pre-school, infant school and beyond will really make a difference to the next generation. But that is all very expensive, and so once again we come to the contradictions of how much we should spend on one policy as opposed to another. Prison and detention are hugely expensive, but perhaps compared to the cost of crime when it is all added up it may not be far off cost neutral. But intensive investment in our very young children is inevitably going to cost a great deal.

However, for all our sakes, including the unborn children who are the criminals to be '“ we need that to happen. And, if it did, we could switch the lights off and save the planet as well.