Imagine yourself late at night, wearing dark clothes, a hood over your head. A stray pedestrian has just turned the corner… You wipe the sweat off your brow. It’s not a cop, only a pub crawler chucked out at last call. Here’s the house you’ve cased… You ease your trusted jemmy between the door and its frame, next to the lock. The jemmy moves side to side noiselessly, or does it? Even the slightest crackle of wood sounds like gun shots going off, about to wake the whole street up. Your heart stops, then restarts. Finally the door is prised open, you slide in, your rubber soles caressing the carpet…
Sounds scary, doesn’t it? Bet you wouldn’t have the nerve to do anything like that – I know I wouldn’t. Neither would Judge Peter Bowers of Teesside Crown Court. Unlike you and me, however, he admires the bravery of a thug breaking into someone’s house. Driven by this noble emotion, yesterday he allowed the recidivist burglar and arsonist Richard Rochford to walk free.
You don’t believe me? Here are the Judge’s own laudatory words: ‘It takes a huge amount of courage as far as I can see for someone to burgle somebody’s house. I wouldn’t have the nerve.’
Truer words have never been spoken. Burglary does take courage. Not as much as rape and certainly not as much as murder, but still quite a bit. And courage, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, must be rewarded not with custodial sentences but with medals. Distinguished Service Medal for burglary. Distinguished Service Cross for rape (aggravated). Victoria Cross for murder.
By passing a suspended sentence on the hero of our time, the good judge has done a disservice to all those brave, intrepid, selfless men who go out every night, jemmy in hand, to strike a blow for human courage. He should have put the serial criminal up for a decoration, pour encourager les autres.
Mr Rochford began to display his bravery at a precocious age. He was merely 10 when he first distinguished himself by breaking into a house. Still a young man, he has already done three years for arson – without receiving as much as a meagre commendation for it. And the four burglaries to which he admitted in Judge Bower’s court are only those for which the modest warrior was prepared to take credit. As there always are, left outside the brackets were no doubt dozens of other burglaries to which our unsung hero didn’t own up.
In addition to praising Rochford’s courage, Mr Bowers further reinforced his legal credentials by explaining he didn’t put the hero away because ‘prison very rarely does anybody any good.’ Admirers of Dostoyevsky, who came out of prison a new, deeper man, might disagree, but by and large the statement is correct. Prison rarely does much good to the prisoner. And you know why? Because that’s not what it’s there for.
Prison is punishment, not a self-improvement counselling service. Punishing a wicked act is its primary function, keeping a criminal off the streets the secondary one, with deterrence strictly tertiary. Rehabilitation, if it’s a desideratum at all, would appear way down on the list. But above all prison is an instrument of justice done and seen to be done. For a society in which justice is debauched won’t remain civilised for long. When a judge, the law personified, praises a burglar’s courage and sets him free, we know that our civilisation is on its last legs.
When Britain was indeed civilised, burglary was a hanging offence. In 1830 Lord Russell abolished the death penalty for house-breaking, which was the humane thing to do. But His Lordship would have thought twice about stepping on that slippery slope had he imagined for a second that less than 200 years later an abomination like Judge Bowers would crawl out of the woodwork.
This wasn’t an isolated event: Mr Bowers has form. In the past he let a recidivist with 80 crimes on his record walk free for a burglary committed four days after his release from prison. ‘I am quite sure you are capable of a lot better,’ he said to the criminal. I’m sure about that too. Given enough incentive, he’d be capable of murder.
On that occasion, the Judge told the court, ‘I must be getting soft in my old age.’ Soft in the head, more like it. This time he showed that he too has the courage of his convictions: ‘I might get pilloried for it,’ said Mr Bowers, referring to his latest miscarriage of justice.
You shouldn’t be pilloried, Your Honour. You should be struck off, preferably without a pension. As to the rest of us, we’re left to ponder the depth of the abyss into which we’re falling – pushed over the edge by the moral decrepitude of PC modernity. And in a less contemplative mood, we should all install extra locks and apply for a shotgun licence.