PUNISHMENT AND POLITICS: EVIDENCE AND EMULATION IN THE MAKING OF ENGLISH CRIME CONTROL POLICY

Vol. 16 No.2 (February 2006), pp.153-155

PUNISHMENT AND POLITICS: EVIDENCE AND EMULATION IN THE MAKING OF ENGLISH CRIME CONTROL POLICY, by Michael Tonry. Devon, UK and Portland, Oregon, USA: Willan Publishing, 2004. 176pp. Hardback. £37.50/$59.95. ISBN: 1-84392-063-8. Paper. £16.99/$29.95. ISBN: 1-84392-062-X.

Reviewed by Ann Chih Lin, Ford School of Public Policy, University of Michigan. Email: annlin [at] umich.edu.

Confronted with academics who have become policy critics, journalists and politicians often hint darkly that scholarship has been corrupted by political opinion. Such criticism is usually easy to refute: an academic’s only claim to an audience is her intellectual integrity, and the stakes for violating its canons are much too high to risk. The more common problem that academic commentators face is different—not too little intellectual integrity, but too much love for expertise. Confronted with careless, internally contradictory, or misconceived policies, the best academics can be provoked into a leap of logic—no policy so stupid could be anything but the result of malice aforethought.

Michael Tonry is one of criminology’s most perceptive scholars of policy. In a dizzying array of books and articles, he has evaluated misguided policies and explained their effects, sifted through the shibboleths of the field to uncover its enduring principles, and used his encyclopedic knowledge of policy tools to suggest approaches that work. But Tonry’s expertise can also lead him first to be impatient, then to ridicule, and in PUNISHMENT AND POLITICS, he displays both. PUNISHMENT AND POLITICS purports to “disentangle the influences of evidence, ignorance, ideology, and self-interest” (p.ix) on Great Britain’s 2003 Criminal Justice Act, which might lead some – particularly political scientists – to expect a book about the policy process. What they will find instead is an indictment of anything-not-in-accord-with-best-practice as, by definition, unjustifiably ignorant, viciously ideological, and/or crassly and myopically political.

Tonry’s ire seems especially great because of the Labour Government’s professed intent to make “evidence-based policy.” Under Tony Blair, New Labour, much like “New Democrats” in the United States, advertised itself as a party that would never let ideology trump competence. In actuality, Tonry charges, competence trumps only when ideology has little to say. Thus on small issues, such as granting prosecutors the authority to determine criminal charges (pp.6-7), or giving judges and magistrates broad authority to use “community punishment” (in the U.S., “community corrections”) as a sanction (pp.7-8), Tonry sees policy based on “empirical research . . . professional experience and simple observation” (p.7). But where research, experience or the observation of commentators like Tonry differ from New Labour’s proposals, Tonry sees malfeasance. Suspended sentences (as opposed to clear-cut decisions between [*154] imprisonment or community sanctions)? Sentencing commissions dominated by judges? Mandatory minimums? Indeterminate sentences for violent or sexual offenders? Changes in criminal procedure? To Tonry, “Ignorance of the evidence isn’t credible. Senior Home Office research and policy specialists know better. Ideology and political self-interest, a wish to appear tough before the media and the public, is what’s left” (p.12).

Assume, for the moment, that the evidence on the damaging and useless nature of each of these proposals is incontrovertible. To say that the opposite of “evidence” is “ideology and self-interest” is an extraordinarily odd way to define any of these terms. Taking positions in accord with both evidence and ideology – to say nothing of evidence and self-interest – is how most politicians, as well as most ordinary people, get through the day. More to the point, if one were to make a serious argument about the victory of ideology over evidence, or political expediency over expertise, one would want to see evidence of bureaucratic and legislative deliberation, interviews with politicians in which they struggled (or did not) with these dilemmas, positions changed in response to public outcry, or indicators of ideology and explanations of its variation.

Tonry offers some of this, but not in a sustained fashion. Thus, Chapter 2 presents marvelously useful and intriguing tables listing “crime summits,” “crime initiatives,” and abandoned “knee-jerk crime policy proposals,” all of which prove to Tonry that the Labour Government will always choose to be “tough” rather than responsible on crime. Most political scientists would argue the opposite, that media events and proposals without follow-through are evidence that a government is not committed to a particular policy approach. These are cheap ways of pacifying a constituency, not indications of deep-seated ideology or political gain. Similarly, Chapter 3 goes into an extended discussion of English exceptionalism. But to argue that the English (and Americans) prefer risk reduction, debasement, and punitiveness lets politicians off the hook too easily for proposing risk-averse, debasing, and punitive policies. Unless one is to believe that culture is both immutable and inexorable, the right political question to ask is why these aspects of the culture triumphed over others in crime policy – and whether evidence-based arguments could co-exist with, or function within, this cultural frame.

To be fair, however, Tonry does not claim to be a political analyst, even though his rhetoric wanders in that direction; he is an expert on crime policy, and in that role there are few better. In the last three chapters of PUNISHMENT AND POLITICS he returns to policy, and his short essays on racial disparities in punishment, on sentencing commissions, and on violent crime present data and proposals for reasonable laws in each of these areas. Those familiar with Tonry’s work will not find anything very surprising in these proposals, and in a way that is his point. So much is known about the deleterious effects of current policies, and the [*155] solutions for ameliorating those effects are so obvious, that Tonry believes all people of good will should be able to agree on them. Nevertheless these proposals, gathered together and counterpoised to current British (and American!) policies, are a handy reference to the “best practices” in sentencing reform – some (especially in the design of sentencing commissions) that have been successfully tried, and others (especially in the area of racial disparities) that are, in their political difficulty, instructive.

Readers of all backgrounds can use PUNISHMENT AND POLITICS as a chronicle of a particular policy moment in British criminal history – the kind of period reference that policy historians will want as a starting point, and polemicists will want to debate. American readers in particular can benefit from Tonry’s thorough description of English policies that look startlingly like our own. In the end, though, Tonry’s goals for this book will primarily be achieved by those who can take his rhetorical question seriously: how might less harmful, more productive crime policies be enacted? While this book will not give them the answer, it keeps the necessity of the question at the top of the agenda, where it should be.

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