Your fears are exaggerated: The playwright David Hare wanted to understand the causes of crime. What an expert told him made a lasting impression

ONE of the fascinations of writing contemporary plays is that they tend to glow at different angles according to the urgency of an audience's current concerns. Last week in the Olivier Theatre, as Michael Howard, the Home Secretary, announced his plans further to increase Britain's already engorged prison population, there was a special sharpening in the response to Murmuring Judges, the second play in my trilogy, and to its portrait of a criminal justice system in which nobody is listening to anybody else.

Three years ago, while researching the play, I realised that our criminal justice system was divided quite sharply into three. At the top are the lawyers, the professionals who, in Ogden Nash's famous couplet, 'have no cares/Whatever happens they get theirs'. In the middle are the police, who are constantly aggrieved at the amount of stick they get from both sides. And at the bottom are the prisoners and the prison service, a group which is basically ignored except when, as in the Strangeways riots of 1990, they make trouble.

It became apparent to me very early on that when I spent a day shuffling between lunch at the Inns of Court, an afternoon in the Clapham nick and an evening in Wandsworth jail, I was, apart from the prisoners themselves, the only person in London that day who was seeing all three parts of the system. I spoke to a number of experienced professionals who were well used to trying to do their job in the gap between what Tory Home Secretaries may say in public and the reality of the criminal statistics. I therefore needed to find someone who had an overview of the whole process.

Nobody was more impressive than Mary Tuck. She had taken a degree at the London School of Economics once her children were in their teens, then answered an ad in the Times for a direct entry principal in the civil service. She became head of research at the Home Office, where she pioneered reliable crime statistics which were independent of police figures. What she said to me then seems even more urgent now.

Mary Tuck: There are two ways of looking at the police . . . Half of them think: 'We're the embattled thin blue line, protecting civilisation against criminals.' The other half think: 'We're here to serve the community.' In fact, 'serving the community' can mask activities just as oppressive and doubtful as some of the things the 'thin blue line' thinking leads to. Most police don't know what they're there for.

DH: But aren't they given an impossible brief?

MT: Of course. I used to have a presentation in which I tried to show the irrelevance of the entire criminal justice system. Every year there are 3.8 million reported crimes. Five per cent have a violent or sexual content. A quarter are to do with motor cars. Another quarter are burglary, vandalism and criminal damage. But 70 per cent of burglaries are of under pounds 100. So much crime is just trivial property theft and to do with opportunity. In the Fifties there were 7,000 thefts from cars a year; now there are 375,000. The targets are sitting there on the streets. Suburban homes in Golders Green and Wimbledon are sitting there empty all day because wives now go out to work, and they're stuffed with goodies like VCRs. The wonder is not that there is so much crime, but that boys from Balham don't get on the tube to Golders Green and nick the lot all the time.

DH: Is the increase in crime figures due to increased reporting?

MT: To an extent. For instance, because of insurance, 98 per cent of car crimes are reported. And the physical violence which used to be taken for granted in domestic situations no longer is. So, quite rightly, more of it gets reported. Of the three categories of rape, rape with strangers has barely increased. It's with intimates and acquaintances that it's really gone up.

So now we call everything crime and ask the police to protect us, all the time fostering a myth that the past was much more peaceable. But in this very street (in Holland Park, London) you couldn't hang laundry out in the Thirties for fear of its being stolen, and there was a fight on the steps outside the pub every Saturday night. But now the magistrates refer everything to the Crown Courts. All the triables- either-way now seem to go up. As a result, the prisons are 50 per cent full of petty offenders who nip in the back door, steal a telly, do probation, do it again, get community service, do it a third time and get prison. There's some evidence that, when a recession comes, burglary goes up, but violence goes down; when prosperity comes, burglary goes down, but violence goes up. Burglary is mostly people at the fringes of the labour market, can't get a job, and so on. There's some evidence that the peak offending age is one year before compulsory school leaving; you know, you need to go to the pub on Saturday night, you don't have the money because you're still at school, so you go out and nick a telly. The peak age for crime used to be 15, now it's 17.

DH: Young men are the problem?

MT: One-third of all men have a conviction for an indictable offence by the time they're 28. Then remember how few people actually get caught, and how many more that would include if it were unconvicted offences as well, and you have the fact that petty crime is completely natural for a certain age group. Add to that the statistical chances of crime on a class basis, on a race basis, on an inner-city basis, and you have the near-certainty that in particular groups everyone is a so-called criminal.

DH: Presumably the figures are always doubtful?

MT: Most foreign criminologists think our figures are unbelievably reliable. So much hysteria about crime is nonsense. The

Daily Mail once had a headline: 'SEXUAL OFFENCES UP 10 PER CENT'. So I did a breakdown. Ten per cent meant 1,300 extra offences. Of these, 50 per cent were between consenting males. Of these, 30 per cent were in Slough. I thought, what's suddenly happening in Slough? Then I find all these extra offences are from one particular public lavatory, which accounts for the whole bloody lot of them. So you do have to handle figures with care.

Only 1.6 per cent of all crimes get dealt with by the courts. What you have is about 8,187,000 offences per year; of which 3,341,300 are reported and 2,122,400 are recorded; of which, only 550,000 are actually cleared up; and 161,000 offenders are actually dealt with. To get a 1 per cent drop in crime, we have estimated you would have to increase the prison population by 38 per cent. Now add that to the fact that 70 per cent of all crimes are committed by 5 per cent of criminals and you have an overall picture of a persistent drizzle of petty crime by a whole lot of people who spontaneously remit at the age of 30, when they decide that going out thieving at night is too much like hard work. And among these you have an absolutely tiny percentage of career criminals.

DH: Is it possible to target this group?

MT: It's terribly dangerous. They try to do it in America, and guess what? He's black, he's from the inner city, and he's into drugs. These are the predictors. But, of course, most black inner-city kids don't turn into career criminals. So if you treat them all as if they will, you risk a terrible class-based injustice. Of course, in America they don't even process crime; they plea-bargain. They're so overwhelmed by it they can't even get it through the courts. That's because they're so stupid about drugs. We once had the perfect system in this country. You went to the doctor for your prescription for nice, cheap, National Health heroin. But this system got a bad reputation, so they started the Drug Dependency Units, and there the doctors began to think: 'Oh, we ought to be curing these people.' So they gave them methadone instead, and all your problems start. Coinciding with a lot of cheap stuff from Iran.

When Mellor was at the Home Office, he was very pleased with the campaign against drunken driving, because the ads pointed out it actually killed people. And this had an effect, so he said: 'Let's do the same thing for drugs. How many people die from heroin addiction?' I had to say: 'Sorry, Minister, if it's properly administered, the answer is none.'

DH: Would you decriminalise drugs?

MT: Oh, without doubt. It's precisely the same question as with prohibition in the Twenties. Look at America. You create a gang culture in which all exchange is at the point of the gun. The natural pricing mechanism of the market is destroyed. You have prostitution, burglary, housebreaking, all to finance the artificially high price of the commodity. You destroy South American countries, you create an intolerable burden of enforcement costs which no society can afford. In America, the inner cities are totally destroyed and handed over to criminals, all to protect the price of crack and heroin.

DH: What did you conclude about our own criminal justice system?

MT: Prison certainly doesn't work. More than 50 per cent of prisoners will re-offend within the next two years. Prison encourages violent crime - it's a university of violence. If you can decrease the prison population, you will decrease crime. It's hugely expensive. So what is the function of criminal justice? Like you, it has a dramatist's function. It exists to say 'we disapprove'. It has a rhetorical power. Prison cannot be practical, so the criminal justice system is mainly symbolic. In the old days, the men in wigs marched through the town to the assizes. And that, basically, is what the apparatus of the law does now.

DH: You said there was some German evidence that the more people you put in jail, the more violent crime increases.

MT: That's right.

DH: How did the Home Secretaries react when it was put to them?

MT: Well, one of the more junior ministers - one of the more honest ones, actually - just said: 'Mary, even if what you're saying is right, how can I possibly put these facts to the public?'

DH: But where does that leave the police?

MT: Well, it's horrible for them, poor dears, because they don't want to be defeatist. They don't want just to sort of say: 'The rain it raineth every day.' But if they were cleverer they would target where crime actually is, and of course in London it's on those terrible housing estates, we all know. If you spent the money you spend on the prison system on improving conditions on those estates, you would have a far more radical effect on reducing crime.

Mostly policemen are bored. They're sitting around waiting for something to happen. Look how they grab the phone when it rings; they're so relieved to have something to do. There are 150 at Notting Hill, but only eight are on the street at any one time. The difference between American and British police is that the Americans have lovely, well-heated big cars and no canteen. So they're in their cars all the time. The English have less good cars but better canteens. The best possible reform of the English police would be to give them better cars and tell them to eat anywhere they like. These policemen in their 30s really frighten me, the keen ones. I mean, I meet a lot of policemen in my work. Of course, with me, with a woman, there's all this very heavy avuncular charm; that's how they treat women. But underneath they're so guarded. The defences are up all the time. I don't know who said it, but dealing with the police is like dealing with an ethnic minority. Of course, it's hard for them, but I don't like some of the things that are happening in the name of community policing. Sure, there ought to be more social cohesion in London; it sounds lovely, but is it really the police's job to bring it about? Are they the best people to do it?

From 'Asking Around' by David Hare, published by Faber and Faber Ltd on 11 October 1993.

Theatre review, page 27

(Photograph omitted)