What on earth is to be done about crime?

The victim

PENSIONER Brian Rowan is disabled and in constant pain. On Saturday at 2.40am he heard banging on the outside wall of his council house in Tang Hall, York. Looking out of his window he saw four youths running away. The £150 closed circuit television camera which he had installed on his house to deter crime had been torn down and thrown into his garden.

Mr Rowan, 70, can describe exactly what it feels like to be a victim of crime. "I was terrified. I didn't go to bed for two nights, I sat downstairs.

"I have worked as a prison officer and a policeman. I thought I was past being scared. But as you get older your personality changes. Once it gets dark and you're on your own, and you know what the estate's like, you're terrified."

Mr Rowan blames parents, first and foremost, for youth crime. "I have always advocated that discipline starts in the home.

"The parents should be made responsible. They should pay full whack for any damage their children do."

He also believes that the council and police should work to evict more families whose children break the law.

"If you take the house away from them, it's not just the lad involved who loses his home, its his brother, sister, mum and dad. Then they might do something about it."

He would like young offenders to be named and shamed from the age of 14. And young offender institutes should be tougher: youths return from a spell inside with new clothes and a cockier attitude, Mr Rowan said.

Tony Blair plans to give more help to rehabilitate prisoners, with harsher penalties for those who re-offend. But the former prison officer does not believe re-education for inmates works.

Mr Rowan said: "I am glad I am at the end of my life. I wouldn't want to be starting out in York, which is still beautiful but it's becoming a mob city."

The Neighbourhood Watch co-ordinator

BRIAN Flanagan favours tougher penalties to deter persistent offenders. He says everybody knows that it is the same few people who, time after time, are responsible for most of the crimes.

He's critical of the way in which, in recent years, we've gone increasingly soft on crime. "From all reports it custody is all play and no work," he says. "There are people going back before the courts time and time again. Is there anything there that's deterring them from going back? There doesn't seem to be."

His is not a lock-'em-up-and-throw- away-the-key,' knee-jerk response advocate, though. The chairman of Clifton and Bootham's Neighbourhood Watch co-ordinators is perfectly aware that many youngsters are drawn into crime because their parents were criminals, or because of the influence of their peers and older teenagers they look up to.

He believes they need to break free from the cycle of crime.

He tells the story of a 17 year old Clifton teenager and repeat offender who was interested in training as a referee with the Clifton Youth Sports programme that Mr Flanagan helped set up.

"He said he wished he hadn't been nicking motorbikes and cars all that time," Mr Flanagan says.

"He hadn't got any education. We wanted to put him down for the referees course, but he couldn't read or write. Two days later he nicked another car."

Mr Flanagan recalls the days of the old Borstals and remand centres - centres such as York's Ashbank House. "Kids were put away for quite a few years," he says.

"They were taught a trade while they were inside, and they didn't lose out on their schooling."

So he's very much in favour of the Government's plans for more education and skills training in jails. He would like to see tougher penalties for first time offenders as well as persistent offenders. But he believes a spell inside can be the best way to snap a young person out of a descent into a life of crime.

"It's got to be for a decent amount of time," he says. "It's no good putting somebody there for three months. It just makes them think they can get away with it."

The policeman

IN the course of his work as York's community safety officer, PC John Bolton has come across plenty of crime victims. Being burgled, he says, can have a "really traumatic effect on people that goes beyond just that moment when you wake up or come home and find your house broken into."

So anything that helps to reduce crime and target police resources where they are most needed is to be welcomed, he says.

"It is a good thing that the Government is taking on persistent offenders. A small number of criminals commit most of the crimes and I definitely think it is right that those people are dealt with appropriately."

He welcomes, too, proposals for better training and more support and rehabilitation. "It is an excellent idea to give people more education and skills rather than just put them back outside to go back to crime."

He disagrees with Brian Flanagan's view that young first-time offenders should get longer custodial sentences.

He says there may be better ways to deal with them - ways that don't involve youngsters being locked up with more experienced criminals who can teach them the tricks of the trade.

"Prison is not the answer to all problems," he says. "It can have a negative effect."

The ex-criminal

LEE, 29, lives in York with his partner and his four boys, all aged under nine. He works as a warehouseman.

But he wasn't always so respectable. Lee has a long list of criminal convictions ranging from theft of a strawberry to grievous bodily harm on three soldiers, for which he served an 18-month prison sentence.

The child of an alcoholic mother and an absent father, he began by smashing windows. By his late teens his mother was dead and he was, he says, "out of control".

"It was like gang warfare. We would travel all over, Stamford Bridge, Dunnington."

He was first in court aged 15 and fined £10 for assault. Later he was sent to a youth detention centre in Cleveland. "That was pretty tough," says Lee.

"I really think they should bring back detention centres. It was a good regime. It's what people need. It was frightening. If you couldn't get on you had a really hard time."

He believes offenders as young as 15 should be sent for a short, sharp, shock, when they are impressionable enough for it to do some good.

Lee has been clear of convictions for seven years, after settling down and having a family. He welcomed the Government's plan to give prisoners more help to re-acclimatise to the outside world and to find work. But he warned some criminals would not be interested.

"They should get a system where they evaluate prisoners and send those that want to do something with their lives to one prison, and the others to another jail."

Updated: 11:44 Tuesday, February 27, 2001