What Really Causes Crime

Crime figures have always been a battleground. They are profoundly unreliable and the best that can be expected is a broad trend over several years. But that trend looks reasonably good in today's annual figures. Official recorded figures show crime may have risen by 2%, while the British Crime Survey (BCS) found it may have fallen by 2%: most analysts reckon that overall it remained stable after recent sharp falls. That will not stop another blast of headlines yet again scaring the living daylights out of a public already wildly misled about the risk of crime.

The BCS is the most reliable measure, sampling people's experience of crime in the past year, instead of relying on the vagaries of crime figures reported to the police. Even with the new, more accurate system for police recorded crime, the survey will always uncover more. Today's BCS figures show overall crime is down by 22% since 1997, domestic burglary down 39%, car crime down 26% and the chance of being a victim of crime lower than at any time since the survey began in 1981. Violence has risen by 2% on one measure or fallen by 5% on the other, but they agree street robbery rose by 28% (mostly kids and mobiles), though in London that has now been brought back down to last years' figure.

The home secretary boasted: "This fall in crime has been sustained thanks to the increased police numbers, a focus on police performance and many crime reduction initiatives." However, he has scant evidence that the fall in crime is due to anything this or the last home secretary did. Some recent figures show that parenting classes do cut juvenile crime and anecdotally other schemes look successful. But there is no evidence that more police mean less crime: perversely, the more police officers around, the more crime gets reported. The chances are that economics, not home secretaries, still shape the course of crime, now as ever. These crime figures for Labour's first five years precisely match what would be predicted from the current state of the economy.

In 1988 a piece of Home Office research fell on stony ground, out of kilter with the ruling ideology of the times. Trends in Crime and their Interpretation plotted crime figures in the last century against the economic cycles, with graphs tracking crime against boom and bust. Its evidence is conclusive: in good times when per capita consumption rises with higher employment, property crime falls. When people have money their need is less great so burglary and theft trends drop. However, theft rises as soon as consumption falls when the economy dips and people on the margins fall out of work.

But that is not the whole picture. Something else happens in good times. People have more money in their pockets, they go out more and their consumption of alcohol rises. The result? They hit each other more and personal violence figures rise. Exactly this is happening now with near full-employment and soaring drink consumption creating a rise in assaults, mainly young men hitting each other at night (mainly not very hard: only 14% visited a doctor afterwards).

Home secretaries don't like to admit they are swept along by economic forces beyond their control. Tories like the cause of crime to be sin and the cure punishment. Labour home secretaries want their own social programmes to be the reason why crime falls. But throughout the last century and in all kinds of countries, this pattern is pinned down in Home Office Research Study 119.

Of course it would be too reductionist, too determinist to suggest nothing else could ever prevail against the economic tides. Since half of all property crime is committed by drug addicts, a quarter of those in jail are former children from care and most prisoners cannot read or write enough to earn themselves a decent living, the right remedies are obvious and could transform the crime figures. Since little has been done in past decades to tackle these causes of crime, no one knows if huge investment in good programmes can buck future economic trends in crime. It is too early to know if well-run schemes from Lord Warner's Youth Justice Board will show up in future crime figures.

But one big disaster makes it unlikely that crime figures will deviate from their old economic destiny. Despite the fall in crime, prison numbers have soared to over 70,000, more people in prison than ever before. There is no justification for the courts giving ever heavier sentences, responding not to facts but to irrational public fear. Governors warn that prisons are about to burst out into using local police cells. Overcrowding makes education and therapy impossible, riots likely. Now the Home Office is bidding for more money to build yet more of these criminogenic human warehouses with their shocking reconviction rates.

Plainly David Blunkett wants to reduce the prison population. Sometimes he says so and next week's white paper will spell out ways to create sentences to let more prisoners out on electronic tags. He knows prison doesn't work and would like to create a prison system that does, housing only essential cases with capacity to treat them intensively. Since most crime is committed by those who have already been arrested before, the failure of the entire criminal justice system to alter the trajectory of people's lives is so expensive the chancellor should refuse more money until prison is used effectively: at £25,000 a year per prisoner, the budget should be cut. The home secretary may know prison is worse than useless, but what he does not know, like Jack Straw before him, is how to stop himself causing prisons to fill every time he panders to the Daily Mail.

The previous head of the Home Office research department used to keep a graph he had privately drawn up on his wall. It plotted the speeches home secretaries made and the direct effect on the prison population. So when Douglas Hurd released some petty offenders from prison and barked out his wish to keep prisons only for serious offenders, the judges listened and gave lighter sentences: the prison population fell. But within a month or two of Michael Howard's infamous "Prison Works" speech, jail numbers climbed steeply and they have soared ever since under Labour rhetoric.

What politicians say usually matters little, but what a home secretary says matters a great deal because judges and magistrates take their cue from his words. So Blunkett has panicked over his cannabis law relaxation and promised to double the sentences for dealers, the courts will now lock away a bunch of relatively harmless small timers: those who might have got one year will now get two or three for no good purpose.

Similarly when Lord Woolf, lord chief justice, thoughtlessly said all mobile phone thieves should serve five years automatically, sentences got harsher. If Blunkett genuinely wants to release wasted money from incarceration to spend on treatment, he has to keep telling the courts that prison doesn't work, whatever the tabloids say. He has to start telling the public what might work.

p.toynbee@guardian.co.uk