Date published: 2006/05/28
The BBC says:
Conviction rates for serious offences such as wounding and rape are too low, the Attorney General has admitted.
Lord Goldsmith said victims had a right to be worried but the government was working to tackle the problem and more offenders were being taken to court.
He was responding to an Observer study which claimed convictions for crimes such as rape and wounding had fallen below 10% since Labour came to power.
The Tories said it showed ministers were losing control of violent crime.
The newspaper reported that cases of serious wounding had risen by more than half in the last 10 years to almost 20,000 annually, while the conviction rate in prosecutions for the offence had fallen from 14.8% to 9.7%.
Police recorded nearly 13,000 rapes in 2004-05, double the total for 1997, while the conviction rate plunged from 9.2% to 5.5% in the same period.
Criminal charges should only be brought when the State believes there is a good possibility of conviction. Unless crime is going up then if you bring more cases to court that means you are almost certainly bringing many dubious cases to court, hence are much less likely to achieve convictions. Serious wounding cases are up by a half but convictions are down by a third. That means (it's simple arithemetic) that almost the same number of people (in absolute terms) are being convicted, which means that almost every one of the extra cases is being thrown out. Similarly rape cases doubled but convictions fell by almost half, hence the same conclusion holds. It seems that the State is charging a lot more people because "something must be done", but the extra cases are so dubious that there are barely any extra convictions. Of course the State can change the rules so that more people are convicted. And that is the usual Blair methodology. It will mean that more guilty people will go to prison, but it will also mean that far more innocent people will go to prison. Of course Blair does not care about that, he only cares that he receives sympathetic headlines in the papers about being tough on crime.
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