Crime & Constraints – politicalbetting.com
Crime & Constraints – politicalbetting.com
The story is a simple one: a man is a factory manager, and things are going badly, and they’re going badly because the factory isn’t efficient, and all the things he thinks increase efficiency decrease it.
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Comments
Edit: Oh yes!
It speaks to me of how useless Starmer is. He may not know much about other things but has decades of experience of the criminal justice system and should be completely familiar with the delays, yet has failed to tackle it at all.
But you would have thought SKS could grasp where the problem was - in October 2025 we shouldn't be scheduling criminal cases in 2028..
One other point you could add - the deterrent effect of criminal justice is severely diluted when it takes multiple years to bring cases to court.
And it demoralises law enforcement.
It is still scandalous, but less than the 20% in increased demand
The big problem is the number of cases that fail due to the increased delays.
Fair cop, though.
Looked at the right way, with the right information, rate limiting steps are a really powerful tool. We would get better outcomes by shifting resources from police and prisons to the court system.
Trouble is that we like the vibes of having more police. We like the vibes of locking people up. The court system- rather less so. That's just overpaid lawyers trying to get wrong'uns off.
It would be great if we had a political system with the pedagogic skills to explain this. We don't, and haven't had for ages- if ever.
The only ones in post for more than a year were Grayling and Buckland.
Thats how seriously the Tories took the office.
Can Starmer do better ?
Yes, the critical constraint should be familiar to anyone who’s run projects or worked in complex production. There’s always one machine or process that determines the throughput of the whole, and the way you make efficiencies over time is to always concentrate on whatever is the current bottleneck.
The same concept applies to transport, for example you could increase long-distance journey times significantly by tackling a handful of problematic junctions.
When they built the Second Severn Crossing, it should have been blindingly obvious that the Brynglas Tunnels would end up being the bottleneck. That was three decades ago, and the Brynglas Tunnels are still the bottleneck.
https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/5574094-trump-military-action-latin-america/
So how can trials be accelerated?
What are the faffing about bits that can be dealt with to offer quick wins?
At the end of September 2019, the open caseload in the Ministry of Justice (Crown Court) was about 38,000 cases. By September 2024, it had more than doubled, rising to 73,105 open cases.
Who'd have thought two months of a Labour government could make so much difference?
Extracts posted the other day reminds us earlier governments had their dabs all over it:-
‘The police weren’t interested’:...
...
Theresa May’s decision to axe 21,000 police officers while she was home secretary.
...
Between 2010 and 2014, after the coalition government ordered the MoJ to slash its budget by almost a quarter, the CPS lost 22% of its solicitors and 28% of its barristers. From 2010 to 2019, the MoJ closed more than half of all the courts in England and Wales, and sold off many court buildings. There are now almost 400,000 criminal cases waiting to be heard in England and Wales.
...
the coalition government’s decision to make stealing goods under £200 into a “summary offence”, which carry shorter sentences, had effectively given criminals a free pass. “These thieves aren’t stupid,” said Neville, the former Met detective. “Why nick £200 when you can nick £199 five times?”
https://www.theguardian.com/news/ng-interactive/2025/oct/23/the-police-werent-interested-whats-driving-the-rise-in-private-prosecutions
(H/t Eric Sykes)
I understand the frustration they cause but I think there has to be some proper transport engineering and modelling behind resolving them, otherwise you simply move the problem somewhere else.
Worked pretty well too.
Unless its a feint....
"You can't buck the market", as our last pedagogic PM once said. That so many voters still want policies that depend on bucking the market shows the limits of the "politician as teacher" approach.
Frankly I think we are also suffering from the talent pool that we chose our leaders from being extraordinarily meagre. I can think of a few reasons:
* Being a politician is a rubbish job compared to being an executive or media personality.
* The media environment favours narcissists and bullshitters
* We've had decades of lionizing the private sector and demonizing the pubic sector
* Centralisation of power in Westminster means that there are few opportunities to get practice wielding real power on a smaller scale, and gain a reputation for competence, instead the ambitious focus on gaining access to back room in-groups and honing their talent for manipulation and intrigue.
This last is the only one where there is a change to be made which is relatively obvious (to me at least). But even that would be a slow process.
I realise this will get me the ban hammer, but it's all George Osborne's fault.
The oft-quoted "austerity", backed, unfortunately, by the LDs in Coalition, continues to resonate through our society. From 2010, while some parts of the public sector (health, education) were left unscathed, other areas suffered savage cuts. Local Government suffered badly with over one million posts lost and savage cuts to services leaving councils vulnerable to the rise of social care demand.
We now see the impacts of the dreadful decisions implemented by Theresa May at the Home Office aided and abetted by idiots like Boris Johnson when Mayor of London. It wasn't just the cuts to Police numbers but the selling off of operational Police offices which effectively distanced law enforcement from the general public but also the closure of court buildings such as Magistrates Courts.
Labour, a decade and a half later, are paying the political consequences for the failings of their predecessors but that's how politics works and they've been left holding the hand grenade. The problem, as we know, is spending money on courts and lawyers isn't popular while making extravagant promised about recruiting more Police (Kemi Badenoch and before her Susan Hall when campaigning to be Mayor of London) are what the public (whose perceptions of criminality are often at huge variance to the facts) want to hear.
For murders committed by obvious fruitloops, skip the trial and initial six months in prison before moving offenders to secure psychiatric units.
Hmm. I can't ever remember a call to go out on your doorstep and applaud any private sector organisation. I think views of 'the public sector' vary wildly, from the unhealthy idolatry towards the NHS, to less charitable views of general bureaucracy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queueing_theory
Here's the scenario. In order to get people who actually understand what's needed to be done, you have to hire people who actually understand what's needed to be done. This requires knowing the issues in the first place. If you can't measure, you can't control. Then you have to pay for the skills.
Let's come back to "knowing" what are the problem? You introduce targets and measures and you get push back or the Daily Mail complaining about box tickers.
And paying for skills? Daily Mail and others rejecting 'gold plated inflation-linked' salaries. So you get the muddlers who muddle along.
Basically we get what we want which is muddling along from crisis to crisis as it sells newspapers etc. Who wants trains to run on time like the Swiss?
Eventually you got to the point of needing a major project such as HS2 or M40, but most of the work is done with junctions and pinch points such as bridges or tunnels.
Sometimes you need an M6 toll, as a 10-mile viaduct through the middle of a major city is an unfixable problem.
I fear entreaties to give Dyson, Sugar and that tosser plumber guy a round of applause may fall on deaf ears, though the media more than make up for any deficiencies of public fawning.
And as far as constraints are concerned, the GOP voted down a Democratic resolution in the Senate which would have required Trump to seek Congressional authorisation for the use of military force against Venezuela.
Trouble is, real power means having control of all the levers. At the moment, Mayors have some control over where they spend, but very little over the total, because they don't have much control over taxes. Instead, it's mostly about government grants.
*He's quite old and I assumed he wanted to retire. But apparently not as I think he is now Finance Secretary.
If LA had spent their cash on a proper public transport system rather than constantly adding more lanes, you'd have much less vehicle traffic, more room for housing etc etc.
I'm a big fan of HS2, but there is an opportunity cost there of £100 billion on trams and buses which would have probably delivered a much better BCR (but only in the north of England, so I can see why that wasn't attractive...).
The latest IPSOS poll (fieldwork 23/10 and 24/10) has the PVV on 17% , the Labour.Green electoral alliance on 15%, D66 (I used to think of them as the Dutch equivalent of the LDs) on 14% and the Christian Democrats on 13%.
The seat projection (changes from the 2023 election):
PVV: 26 (-11)
Labour/Green: 23 (-2)
D66: 22 (+13)
Christian Democrats: 20 (+15)
VVD: 16 (-8)
JA21: 12 (+11)
Other Parties: 31 (+1)
NSC: 0 (-19)
That's what you might call a bit of an upheaval. Basically, not a bad result for the battered old centrists in all honesty. The further reduction of the VVD notwithstanding, Rutte governed a coalition of the VVD, D66 and the CDA (Christian Democrats) and that that would have 58 seats. Could we get a D66 Prime Minister for the first time?
Could Pechtold negotiate a majority coalition with the Labour/Greens offering support as well as some of the minor parties? Interesting times ahead.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_path_method
Interesting that different disciplines have their own terminology for what’s basically the same idea, that there’s always one point that dictates the speed of the whole process.
"I'll make you a deal. I'll let you tell me why the last government is to blame, if you'll then tell me how you're going to sort it out."
So, how do we address this? Well, we certainly need more prison places but we also need to think much more carefully about who is in the prison and for how long. Sentences have been increasing for the most serious crimes for more than 20 years now. We have far more very long term prisoners who, inevitably, are very difficult to handle because what can we do to them?
In Scotland we have introduced a policy of a presumption against short sentences, that is less than 6 months. Which sound sensible. After all causing someone to lose their job, their house, contact with their family etc really doesn't help recidivism. But with prisoners now serving only 40% of their sentences under 4 years this means you cannot impose jail for less than a year in practice. Which means we urgently need community based disposals that are a sufficient sanction to disincentivise the opportunistic criminal. Programs which encouraged them onto the right path would be even better.
We also have a series of fixed penalties and fiscal fines for the stuff we used to prosecute in the courts. Which works perfectly well with those who actually have money but they are rarely (road traffic aside) the problem.
None of these "solutions" has prevented Scotland from having very similar problems to England. Trials take much longer than they used to. More than 25 years ago now I used to routinely get through 4 trials in the Justice of the Peace court in a day. Inconceivable these days. The disclosure provisions are extremely onerous and bureaucratic. Neither I nor my colleagues can speak to a complainer or a witness without making disclosure of what was said. The defence are supposed to read all this guff and can be criticised if it is found that they have not.
My conclusion is that this is not really a bottleneck problem. It requires a series of changes at each and every stage, each of which will make improvements and cause further stress elsewhere. If I had to choose one I would say we need to focus on policies and strategies that reduce reoffending. We are very poor at that and it creates a lot of the demand in the system.
(It's not quite bottleneck/rate limiting step/critical path theory, but it has some similar properties. Again, nobody ever found an effective way of saying it to fit in the attention span of a media interviewer.)
Makes mental note to change her name to Cassandra. **
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c77zvl0777mo
On courts, note that the bottleneck has got worse under the new government. I suspect the only real answer is a massive and unpopular amnesty/deals to accept light pleas for cases running years over time.
On another bottleneck problem, our beloved and highly competent government was on the right lines when it made it a priority to smash the gangs and stop the boats. Doing that will enable the asylum system bottleneck to sort itself out. Any idea, 15 months in, what the timetable is for that aim? It seems to me we should be about there by now.
It's not just blagging, is it?
The principal victims of delays of course is that ignored group of people, victims of crime and potential witnesses.
Um, good, well-argued article, BTW.
Anyone with qualifications in Operations Research (which this is) would not be allowed to head a major project in the Civil Service.
The Proper Generalists have no idea how the real world works.
This is made crystal clear to every jury. What they read on the internet is not necessarily right and it is not evidence in the case. It cannot be allowed to influence their decisions. It sounds relatively innocent but the consequences are significant.
Yes, and the judge seemed to throw the (verbal) book at him:
"Judge Tracey Lloyd-Clarke described Richards' actions as a "flagrant disobedience of the court's directions".'
Surely the discharge of him and his fellow jurors and a lecture on wasting the Court's time would have been sufficient.
I am no expert on courts and the law. And I think we would all hope that were we ever in trouble ourselves we would receive a fair go before whichever court we appear before. I also don't necessarily think US style plea bargains are perfect. But is there not a happy medium were obvious cases don't get to court? Do such cases exist?
Why has it arisen? I'll tell you why - and it is exactly the same reason as I said in August 2019 -
"The legal system has few friends. There is an assumption that it mostly deals with the criminal and the feckless. Few politicians care about them. It has no “Aaah” factor. Most people hope never to encounter it. Those who are caught up in it are generally appalled by the experience. It has been in recent years put in the care, if that is the word, of politicians with little knowledge about it and little willingness to learn, let alone to fight to make it better.
For 6 years from 2012 to 2018, no lawyer was deemed worthy to be Minister of Justice, the choice instead falling on Chris Grayling and Liz Truss, about whom the word “second-rate” would be an undeserved compliment. Michael Gove spent much of his time undoing the damage caused by his predecessor. Few Ministers lasted more than a year. And who was responsible for the police? Well, one Mrs May, followed by Amber Rudd and Sajid Javid. Enough said.
Lawyers, however eloquent they may be on behalf of their clients, are generally hopeless at explaining why law and justice matter to anyone other than fellow lawyers. But our legal system does matter, very much indeed. There is no more important function of the state than the maintenance of law and order.
Crucial to that are a competent police force, a legal system which works and in which equality under the law and access to justice are not simply empty phrases, prisons which are something other than a breeding ground of violence and hopelessness and a probation service which works. All these aspects matter not just one of them.
The rule of law is not simply an airy phrase: it is the reality of a state able to keep its citizens safe, a state able to apprehend criminals, a state able to dispense justice, a state able find the right balance between the rights of the innocent and the guilty, a state able to enforce its laws, a state able to punish fairly and provide the hope of rehabilitation for those who have paid their dues. ........
The rule of law in its widest sense is something of which Britain ought to be proud; it has probably had a greater claim than the NHS to be considered “the envy of the world“. But for too long it has been neglected, downgraded, ignored and managed by penny pinchers who know the price of everything and the value of nothing. Futile as this plea may be, it is long past the time for this to stop."
(https://www1.politicalbetting.com/index.php/archives/2019/08/11/blind-to-justice/)
I'll be naughty and repost this.
Welcome back. Unlike many on here I’m a pragmatist when it comes to Trump, there’s little point getting wound up about someone miles away over whom we have little control. If you follow people who support him as well as those who hate him, then you get a better understanding of where he’s coming from, even if he can be somewhat unpredictable. Certainly a unique politician, that’s for sure.
Washington Post editorial board comes out in support of Trump tearing down East Wing and building a massive ballroom. That is wrong. But what is unethical is the owner of the Post, Jeff Bezos, is donating millions to build the ballroom (via Amazon) yet they did NOT Mention that.
https://x.com/DeanObeidallah/status/1982420808460026113
During a trip to DC last week, CNN CEO Mark Thompson made a visit to the White House, where he promoted the network’s new streamer
Staffers were taken aback the next morning when Thompson urged to ease up on East Wing renovation coverage
https://x.com/NatalieKorach/status/1982617484126818631
It's a funny old game Saint.
So if you want to duck jury duty....
Nothing to do with the topic, which ofc is shocking - we lock up the most people on the planet (or something like that) and we wonder why we run out of prisons.
How is that worth 4 months in jail?
Now the judge might be very angry with all this but he shouldn't be sentencing based on that anger, which is what I think he's done here.
It does seem an over the top punishment for a stupid mistake.
The complex of educational, emotional, psychological and psychiatric problems of the prison population remains mostly unaddressed both during and after incarceration.
A model by which we (pace the Daily Mail) acted on the basis that most crime most of the time has its origin outside bare criminal evilness (though some does) would help.
We are in a society that likes penny-pinching, because it assumes that frees up pennies for sweeties now. As for future us, they're in the future, so serves them right.
I expect the only thing the juror wanted to do was not feel like an idiot for not knowing something where it was being implied that the details were obvious
But I disagree that Starmer and his govt are disinterested.
One thing this govt is not short of is lawyer politicians. Unusually they have been willing to be radical in this area - e.g. in reducing jury trials.
And at a time when money is very tight, even a modest increase in the justice budget shows prioritisation.
The reality is though that this is a long term fix.