Blair should tackle poverty to beat crime - report

LONDON, July 9 (Reuters) Prime Minister Tony Blair should stop blaming the criminal justice system and instead focus on reducing inequality and poverty if he wants to cut crime, a report from a think tank said today.

The Crime and Society Foundation (CSF) said Blair's attempts to improve the efficiency of courts and police would only ''turn a system that performs dreadfully into one that performs badly.'' Last month Blair pledged to put more people in jail by ''rebalancing'' the legal system in favour of victims.

The government has been under pressure over the bungled release of foreign prisoners and charges by the opposition Conservatives that it is in chaos over crime and immigration.

But the CSF said the government was mistaken in thinking it could reduce crime just by changing the criminal justice system, because police records vastly underestimated the actual number of offences committed.

In a report written by criminologist Richard Garside, the CSF said studies suggested the true level of crime could be ten times higher than that recorded by the British Crime Survey, which records the public's experience of crime.

''This points to a problem at the core of the government's drive to improve the performance of the criminal justice system,'' Garside said in the report.

''For all the energy and resources it has devoted to this enterprise, it, in essence, is attempting to turn a system that performs dreadfully into one that performs badly.'' Garside pointed to an academic study which concluded that rising poverty and unemployment in the 1980s were to blame for the rise in the number of homicides in England and Wales from 564 in 1980 to 766 in 2000.

''Rather than being an artefact of a failing criminal justice system, the rising homicide rates during the 1980s and 1990s were the result of profound and lasting social, economic and political changes,'' he said.

A new agenda on crime was needed that took seriously ''the relationship between victimisation and a wider set of power inequalities in society,'' Garside said.

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