The Law

What do you think of the legal system in the UK? Do the police do a good job? Are the courts as effective as they should be? What about sentencing, should sentencing be more or less harsh? Do we need more or fewer prisons? Are lawyers really as bad as their reputation says they are?

Is there a legal system over here ?

I think our legal system sucks. They are too busy giving speed tickets to people going 3mph over the limit for easy money rather than catching proper criminals. They are scared of the proper criminals lol. It is crazy.
I don't know enough about the actual courts to comment too much but I think sentencing should be harsher. They also call them "Holiday Camps" prison lol. I wish I could have all my bills and food paid for and provided and live in a place that has pool tables, games consoles and sky television. Must be such a hard life

Should prisons be made harsher? If they was less easy going, would this deter people from wanting to go back in? Whats your overall opnion on how todays prisons are run?

The irony here is that the very people that complain about the police not doing their jobs properly and the courts not giving out harsh enough sentences are the very ones that caused it to be like that in the first place. One of the greatest failures of our modern system is that people have been encouraged for so long to reject any form of personal responsibility for what is happening around them. They want more police and tougher, longer sentences, but they don’t want to have to pay for them. They want us all to crack down on crime and anti-social behaviour, but not if it is themselves, or those close to them that are doing it (because it’s ok then). The comment that the police should concentrate of “real criminals” rather than the motorist going 3mph over the speed limit ignores the fact that speeding is a crime, and one, in my opinion that needs harsher sentences because they are taking a lethal weapon (several tonnes of metal known as a car) and driving it at unsafe speeds and I am sure that the hundreds of people every year that lose loved ones to deaths caused by people speeding don’t consider it a petty crime. I believe that anyone caught speeding should instantly be charged with attempted murder, because that is basically what they are doing, they know that speed kills, yet they are willing to overlook that, and forget about how many people they could kill, as long as they can get to where they are going that few minutes faster.

The police in the UK are a bit of a “Curate’s egg”. Many of them do a good job, are over worked, underpaid and do a job that few of us would be willing to do ourselves and take a lot of abuse for doing so. Yet at the same time, speaking from personal experience as well as from hearing from others, the police are barely trusted in many sections of society, and justifiably so. They all too often will detain someone based on nothing more than how they look or what the officer is feeling at the time. This causes a lot of ill feeling from those people (and I have been one myself from time to time) that have been detained and even arrested whilst doing nothing illegal and have been subjected to violence and intimidation by the police for no reason other than the officers thought they might be up to something because they didn’t look quite right or were in the wrong place at the wrong time. I. myself have been arrested, later to be released without charge, for breach of the peace for making a silent protest (supposedly our legal right in this country), for arson (simply because I knew the victim some years previously), assault and theft (because I was wearing leathers in an area where everyone else were wearing suits). Each time, I have been proven completely innocent of such allegations, but no apology was made and no attempt at reconciliation was made either. I was simply dismissed with a “well it serves you right for not conforming” attitude. When people are constantly subjected to this type of behaviour, it is little surprise when the police are distrusted and even in many cases hated by those sections of the community that have to put up with it.

One of the main things that worries me about the justice system as a whole is that if a normal person reports a crime, most of the time it is simply logged and that is the last that person hears about it, whereas if the case is high profile, involving a famous person, or has made the news in some way, that case always seems to be solved much more quickly than any normal case does. This raises the rather cynical questions of are the police working harder to solve these high profile cases, and if so, why can’t they do the same for every case, rather than just the high profile ones? Or another possibility is the more sinister question of are the police solving this crime by convicting someone who just happens to be handy, rather than the real offender, just to be seen to have solved the case? This more sinister question is especially brought to the fore in recent weeks where several high profile cases have had their convictions overturned and the cases having to be reopened again.

When it comes to the prison service, the attitude of our entire society is wrong. Prison should be about rehabilitation, not revenge. Prisoners should be taught not to commit further crimes, rather than just locked up to feed the victims need to see revenge for he crime. Whenever there is a particularly horrible crime committed, our media start screaming for tougher, harsher and longer sentences because the public like to feel that the perpetrator of that crime is being punished, but that’s not what the criminal justice system is there for. Revenge can never be justice in any shape way or form, it is just using an excuse to hurt that person for hurting us. The justice system is meant to take people that have broken the law and rehabilitate them, and turn them into members of society again that are not likely to break the law again. This can never happen as long as the emphasis is on punishment rather than rehabilitation.

A major change that needs to be made to our justice system is in the courts. Lawyers should not be able to get the guilty person off “on a technicality”. Where loopholes in the law, or technicalities are run into, these should be closed up immediately to prevent anyone else from being able to get away whilst guilty. However, it is also important to remember that it is far better for 1000 guilty people to walk away scot free than for 1 innocent person to be unjustly convicted, and this is something that we have forgotten again in this country. We have moved towards the American system of “Guilty until proven innocent” and would much rather have 1000 innocent people go to prison than see 1 guilty person walk free. We cannot live as a jus society with this kind of system and it needs changing again immediately.