Rhys Jones

...but will the politicians listen? Somehow, I doubt it!

Since I wrote my piece on gangs and drugs on Saturday I've seen a steady trickle of hits from Google searches about Rhys Jones and I've kept an eye on the search terms and found I was pretty well alone in voicing the opinion that drugs policy plays the biggest part in the gang gun deaths that stalk some of our estates. So it is with some relief that I find Johann Hari is another voice of sanity in today's Independent:

Johann Hari: Tragic victims of a self-defeating policy:

This is the story of two victims of a war that cannot be won and should not be fought. You have heard of the first: Rhys Jones, the 11-year-old in Liverpool who was shot in the neck as he played on his bike. You have not heard of the second: Andres Sauzo, a 24-year-old Mexican man who had his arms, legs and head chain-sawed from his body, and was found rotting in five bin bags scattered across his home town of Zihyatanejo. They are casualties - either direct or indirect - in a war that kills tens of thousands of people a year, and could end tomorrow, if we chose to.

Rhys and Andres were killed because of a political decision by the US government to wage a global "war on drugs", and demand other governments fall into line. When you criminalise a massive and growing industry – some 5 per cent of the world's entire economic activity – it does not go away. It is handed to armed criminal gangs, who flood the streets with guns to secure a slice of the riches.

Aside from also citing Milton Friedman, he goes on rightly to criticize the British political reaction to the events of the past week. I hope some of them are listening, and can hear over the noise of their knees jerking and their bandwagons' creaking...

The scattered proposals tossed out this week to deal with drug gangs are elaborate evasions of the real issue. Banning gang videos on YouTube is barely even a sticking plaster, while the Cameroonian idea that gangs are the rancid afterbirth squeezed out by single parents simply doesn't match with the facts. Denmark has the highest rate of single parenthood in Europe – but it has virtually no gangs, except among recent immigrant communities, who overwhelmingly consist of stable two-parent families.

No: if we want to stop gang culture, we need to take back the industry that makes gangs rich, and give it once again to doctors, pharmacists and off-licenses. Legalizing drugs rips the spine out of gangs. Of course they will try to move into other industries – protection rackets, cigarette smuggling and so on – but these have far lower profit margins. In a legalised economy, the gangs would no longer be the richest kids on the estate, and could barely afford firepower, so the core of their glamour would melt away.

We should be outraged. In my opinion our governments, acting in our name, are knowingly complicit in the suffering and the deaths that all this causes, for little benefit and certainly with no liberal philosophical justification. We should be demanding action now, not only to save future Rhys Joneses, but to save what is estimated at £18bn a year in domestic policing and criminal justice costs alone.

Over at Antonia Bance's blog she's got a piece on what we can do to help prevent any more Rhys Jones type horrors. One thing stands out for me. She says:

I don’t believe that anyone is born a criminal (one of the reasons why I’m on the left)

I'm not sure that follows. The other day I was having a dicsussion on another forum with someone whose personal political hero was, he said, Peter Hichens. I don't think that people at that end of the spectrum would ever believe that people are born criminal either.

Where they would differ is in whether the chance of committing crimes was determined by one's socio-economic outlook and therefore whether spending money on particular groups of people helps prevent such a descent into crime or not.

What they would say is that the suggestion that because you're in a poor or deprived area or have few opportunities you are more likely to turn to crime is itself an unjust slight on the vast majority of people in poor or deprived circumstances who live without committing crimes.

They would say that the sort of language used by the late Victorian social reformers, such as in that Charles Booth map of east London poverty where whole areas were blocked out as being "vicious and semi-criminal" that, with a bit of outside assistance, could be lifted out of such a plight, was patronising middle class liberal rubbish that let people off the hook of taking personal responsibility for themselves. And that "the left" by adopting that prognosis perpetuate the problem.

Me - I don't know. I believe in the innate goodness of everyone. And that the free will with which we are all vested means that everyone, rich or poor, chooses to do right or wrong. But I also believe that many are diddled out of their natural birthright by the great monopolies that the anarchists, libertarians and liberals of that late nineteenth century idenitifed. And that pre-distributing that common birthright ought to be enough to give everyone sufficient opportunity to be able to make he choice not to commit crime. That we ought not to be deciding how to spend others' money so much as simply making sure that people have their common birthright in the first place and then leaving them to their own decisions.

Just one final thing on Rhys Jones and other teen murder victims before I shut up about it...

I spotted this comment on another blog :

"what is going on in this country, if children are not being abducted and killed, by adults, they are being killed by people of their own age, we need to stop this now"

...and to be sure, the reaction of some in the political and media sphere is encouraging this kind of hysteria, but, whatever the tragedy of each individual case, we ought to recall that these incidents are still very rare. There are over thirteen million under eighteens in this country and the vast, vast majority will make it to adulthood without these sort of traumas.

Everyone seems to be trying to analyze what caused the death of Rhys James, and what can be done about it. More police, punishment or reward for parents taking more responsibility, compulsory community service, blah, blah, blah. I can categorically state that none of this matters. Rhys was killed by government policy, particularly on drugs, that creates an ideal environment in which organized crime can flourish and drag into its sphere of influence vulnerable youngsters...

In the Independent today Camila Batmanghelidjh of Kids Company provides some insight gleaned from her eleven years of working with dislocated children:

This is not what David Cameron refers to as anarchy; it is nihilism. It is an absence of values in which the notion of society, community and responsibility has been eradicated by violence. Every encounter with adults for these children has been toxic. Instead, the lives of these children and young people are about survival. They are, in their own words, "lone soldiers" who come into contact with those who will facilitate violence.

She goes on to describe how the lack of services and support is filled...

Who steps into this void? Imagine three concentric circles. In the first stands the drug dealer and gangster, a remote-control businessman who leads a criminal network. In the second stand our lone children. They are recruited by the dealer, initially by riding around on their bicycles providing information. In the third circle are children who imitate the violence.

And I might add, when a family has already been tainted with drug use and abuse and parental contact with authority is as a result become something to fear, lest one's relatively innocent personal habits turn one into a criminal, what reference point do these children have? I leave the solution up to you to discover. Take out the inner of those concentric circles Camilla talks about and the whole structure of criminal influence collapses...

To me, Rhys Jones died because of government and international policy which is not only failing to stop addiction (even if that were a valid aim of public policy - see "On LIberty"), but encouraging and subsidizing organized crime. Legalize now to stop these government sponsored deaths. Does any party have the true grit to deal with this, or are we going to be forced to accept intrusions like this horror or total breakdown like this in the vain attempt to fight a war that cannot be won?