AGAINST ALL POLITICAL TRENDS - A POPULAR HOME SECRETARY

Once upon a time, in that strange and faraway land before 1 May last year,
the Home Office was the politicians' graveyard. In they strutted, all those
Tory and Labour Home Secretaries, only to slink away at the end with boos
and catcalls ringing in their ears. Down every Home Office corridor lurked
an elephant trap. Crime? It never went down. Civil liberties? The Home
Secretary was invariably against them. Prisons? The most optimistic scenario
was to keep the lid screwed down on that sulphurous cauldron.

Now something weird is happening. Jack Straw is rewriting the political
rules. Dammit, the man is a popular Home Secretary! He is proving to be the
safest pair of hands in the Cabinet. All about him is disarray. Welfare
reform has come off the rails. The economy is looking distinctly unwell.
Education reform is a hologram, a fact which may become all too apparent now
that Stephen Byers has moved on to greater things. The PM himself has been
fingered for Cronygate, the Martyrdom of St Frank, and for delusions of
presidential grandeur in the Downing Street "rose garden", not to mention
tantrums in Tuscany. Yet last week the Home Office was getting on with it as
usual, diligently dispensing yet more New Realism with its probation and
prisons Green Paper.

Of course, not everything is going to win Straw universal plaudits. On the
civil liberties front, he is behaving like - well, like any other Home
Secretary. His proposals to end the asylum shambles may create further
shambles. And unless he backs up his support for marriage by concrete
proposals, his family policy will become just another sham.

However, Home Secretaries are judged principally by how they handle the core
issues of crime and punishment. And here Straw has hardly put a foot wrong.
He has swapped ideology for pragmatism. So he wants to know 'what works',
and then he'll back it. This is what lay behind the research review
published the other week. This caused shrieks of dismay that the dreaded
Home Office culture of appeasement was rising from the ashes and Straw was
going soft on crime.

True, that review did strike some jarring notes. Damning "zero tolerance"
policing as it did with the faint warning that it might prove
counter-productive in the long-term had a whiff of appeasement about it -
not least because the short-term results seem so spectacular, and the thing
hasn't been around long enough for there to be any long term yet.

But the review's main message was that the criminal justice system plays
merely a peripheral role in the fight against crime. And that's absolutely
right. Nothing - neither imprisonment nor community sentencing - works by
itself, because it's all merely shutting the stable door after the horse has
bolted. To counter crime effectively, the emphasis must shift to fixing the
stable locks. Yet here again, the review gave rise to some qualms. It was
conspicuously silent on the single most significant and constant factor
among criminals: their shattered family lives. The emphasis in the Crime and
Disorder Act on tackling the root causes of crime in childhood is excellent.
But if Straw relies too heavily on research by academics who subscribe to a
politically correct herd agenda, he'll go wrong.

His general approach, however, is sound, as is his policy of "making prison
work", an astute way of turning Michael Howard's infamous phrase into
something that combines populism with realism. His decision to continue
building private prisons does stick in the throat, though, principally
because depriving people of their liberty is simply a responsibility that
should not be farmed out to profit-making companies. But Straw, like
everyone else, is at the mercy of the Treasury. And the Treasury thinks
private prisons are a roaring success, and it is hard to argue against this.
After initial teething problems, they're being run as well if not better
than regular prisons, not least because of the absence of the baleful Prison
Officers' Association.

More important is what happens inside them. Again, Straw has indicated that
he will encourage regimes that do some good: more education, for example, or
more programmes to tackle drug abuse and target other offending behaviour.
But such good intentions will come to nothing if the prisons remain full to
bursting. The size of the prison population is perhaps the most sensitive
area of Straw's criminal justice brief. It is certainly the one over which
he is most coy. And here we enter a murky area.

In opposition, Straw was criticised for talking the prison population up by
his "tough on crime" rhetoric. He was responding to a perceptible change in
the public mood, which seemed to date from the murder of James Bulger when
something in the collective psyche appeared to snap. After that, judges and
magistrates felt public opinion demanded longer sentences and they had to
respond. No politician disabused them. Now Straw is responsible for the
system, he knows full well that bursting prisons can derail his policies and
reputation. But still he chooses not to talk down the prison population,
because he judges the public mood remains fearful. He is choosing instead a
more subtle approach, such as the centralisation and rebranding of the
Probation Service proposed in last week's paper. To persuade both the public
and the courts that non-custodial penalties are no soft option, no doubt
probation will be given some faintly chilling new name: the National
Corrections Service, perhaps, or a title with Public Safety in it, which
would sound like something from the French Revolution.

But the courts take their line from the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Bingham.
And here the murk really descends. Bingham is known for his enlightened
views about the importance of crime prevention and so forth. Yet in practice
his messages to the bench have been distinctly mixed. When he sat in
Liverpool crown court a while back to keep his hand in, he passed a
stupendously stiff sentence which left the regular bench aghast. So judges
and magistrates are confused by the ambiguity. But the word is that Bingham
feels he's getting ambiguous signals from the Home Office. And remarkably,
the Lord Chief Justice is said to be terrified of upsetting the Home Office
- - and, doubtless, public opinion.

Never mind the charge that Jack Straw plays politics with the prison
population. The alarming signs now are that the judges are doing the same
thing. The courts, however, should dispense justice, not populism. But Straw
is a real politician. And as such he is positioning himself with great
sure-footedness. It is impressive - and to his rivals, deadly.

Checked-by: Melodi Cornett