The words 'mouth', 'money' and 'put' come to mind....

In a nutshell, are we collectively prepared to put our tax money where our law and order mouth is? I suspect not.
This year's spate of killings of young males in our inner cities by their contemporaries, coupled with the violent deaths of several adults who have had the temerity to challenge groups of teenagers, has prompted much breast-beating and heart-searching as to what kind of society we have become.
Among those with a penchant for simple solutions, the call has gone out for stiffer sentences. This, however, ignores the unpalatable fact that if we have to pass ANY kind of sentence, then the system has already failed. Failed to prevent the offence. Failed to prevent the slide into antisocial attitudes and low-level offending that inexorably graduates to more serious criminality. Failed, too, in the ten year old words of New Labour to be tough on the causes of crime, let alone tough on crime itself.
Being tough on crime does not lie in ever more severe sentencing, but in investing sufficient financial resources into achieving the necessary levels of manning within police forces up and down the country, and backing that up with sufficient finances to resource those officers properly in terms of support services, equipment and the like. Low cost, superficially-trained pretend police officers are not an answer; they merely contribute to the problem. We need to do this in order to raise the likelihood that an offender will be detected and apprehended to a level where that prospect becomes a real disincentive to take the risk. The majority of persistent offenders at whatever level of seriousness at present operate in an enviroment where they can be fairly confident that they will not be apprehended.
Having resourced the police properly, we must then do the same for the Crown Prosecution Service, so that it can attract, reward and retain advocates of the highest quality. We must do likewise for the Probation Service and the Prison Service.
That will give us a chance of dealing more effectively with the current generation of offenders.
Being tough on the causes of crime is the only hopeful route to bringing about a reduction in the offending levels of the next and subsequent generations. Again, it is primarily a matter of being prepared to put in the financing that will actually permit the professionals in the respective fields to:
- work on improving the parenting skills of those whose own parents have failed to demonstrate to them what this involves.
- reduce the levels of illiteracy and innumeracy which result in too many children leaving school unfitted for employment in the workplaces of the 21st century.
- put in place the drug and alcohol treatment programmes which already exist and have been shown to work, but which are not accessible to most addicts.
- tackle the evil of domestic violence which pervades the homes of so many of those who drift into offending already accepting violence as the strategy of choice for any dispute, and of almost all of those taken into care by the local authorities.
- improve basic housing stock, so that children do not have to grow up in accommodation which is cramped, cold, damp and in disrepair.
Being tough on the causes of crime also involves looking critically at the level of financial support which the state needs to provide for those not in work, whilst at the same time working more assiduously to help these people into work paid at a level which enables them to provide for their families.
Perhaps then we might have a suitably fertile soil in which to grow once again the social cohesion which has withered away among young people in so many inner city ghettos.

Everything I have identified makes good sense, but it costs good money and there's the catch. There is only one source of government finances and that is the taxes paid by you and me. Are we yet sufficiently concerned about these things to truly put our money where our mouth is? I am reminded of a comment made by Alan Beswick, the BBC Radio Manchester presenter, to a caller to his morning phone-in programme some years ago:
"At every election since 1945, we the public have been offered a choice. Good government or cheap government. We have always voted for cheap." Well, now we are reaping the consequences.