Sentence on statistics

Rather than allay public anxieties concerning the incredibly rare crime of child abduction and murder, the Home Office is now promising to strengthen the powers afforded to the police and other agencies through the sex offenders register.

As a supposed alternative to the lynch mob incidents facilitated by the introduction of the register, there are now proposals being drafted to arrest and detain initially approximately 250 persons deemed dangerous.

Home Office psychologists now claim to be able to analyse data concerning individuals to produce a profile that can be placed within a set of re-offending risk categories.

At one end there has been identified a group - about 1% of those on the register - that it is claimed are virtually certain to re-offend.

Based on this methodology, we have heard calls for those ex-offenders to be taken out of the community, before they have chance to re-offend and to be detained indefinitely.

In the case of ex-offenders, a sentence served must be a sentence spent.

Prosecuting suspects based upon evidence of their acts is entirely different from persecuting types of people.

To be re-imprisoned on the justification of nothing more than statistics is a worrying precedent.

Statistics may be a valuable tool in targeting resources, but they play no place in the administration of justice per se.

Legal rights to a fair judicial process and to be free from persecution are universal and realistic ideals.

The emotive 'rights of children to be safe' position being used to trump concerns over due process and civil liberties, is an intangible concept which can never be realised.

The introduction of knee-jerk draconian policies and the concurrent exacerbation of perceived (disproportionate) risks, can never afford any more freedom to children.

Darryl Bickler, trainee solicitor, civil liberties group Freedom and Law