MOST eras have their symbolic murders: crimes that are not only terrible but seem also to reflect the nation's pathologies. Victorian London had Jack the Ripper; modern Britain has the death of James Bulger, a two-year-old who in 1993 was abducted from a Merseyside shopping centre, tortured and killed by Jon Venables and Robert Thompson, both aged just ten. Their trial inspired national fury, revived in 2001 when they were released under new names. Mr Venables has now been returned to custody for an unspecified breach of his licence. Unspecified by the government, that is; channelling the ire the crime still arouses, newspapers have gleefully relayed rumours of his offence.

It is not surprising that this incident retains its power to appal: the grainy CCTV image that captured the small boy being led away by a bigger one has become an icon of depravity. The trouble is, the case held up a mirror less to the real state of Britain than to its dark, psychic fears. The confusion of those things has led to mistaken conclusions being drawn from it. They may be again.

Parents naturally fear harm coming to their children. But the recent increase in that sentiment is odd, because the murder of children, always rare, has become more so. Murder by children—it was the age of Mr Venables and his accomplice that shocked most—is even rarer. And while the shock they caused was understandable, it was also irrational. Children are generally thought to be less capable of moral reasoning than adults; they are permitted to be ruder, noisier, even, in a limited way, more violent; they are seen as less responsible for their actions. Except, it turned out, when they kill: “unparalleled evil”, said the judge in 1993, echoing a view that the boys represented evil incarnate.

Thus the murder chimed with fears about children's safety, and at the same time violated a confused but cherished notion of infant innocence: a pyrotechnic combination. In truth it was too exceptional to be used in diagnoses of British society's ills. Nevertheless, it was, not least by Tony Blair, then the shadow home secretary, who called it a “hammer blow against the sleeping conscience of the nation”. Some criminologists and police officers partly trace the toughening of sentencing policy in the years since, especially for young offenders—and thus the huge rise in the prison population—to the outrage the crime provoked.

The immediate political row this week concerned how much the government should say about Mr Venables's circumstances. Jack Straw, the justice secretary, claimed to be balancing the public's “right to know” with the risk of prejudicing future criminal proceedings. He was also, of course, juggling his official duties and his instincts as a politician. He wavered, but in the end sensibly opted to say very little. But Mr Venables has already been enlisted in a more important debate, about the rehabilitation of criminals: if it works and whether it is worth paying for.

Hard cases, bad vibes

Sober reflection suggests that—living as he does under an assumed identity, with the fear of discovery as well, presumably, as crushing guilt—Mr Venables's situation, like his crime, is too freakishly unusual to help in reaching broader judgments. Yet some have seen him as proof that some young criminals are beyond rehabilitation; that they are over-indulged when in custody and released from it too soon. The tabloid throw-away-the-key cause has been boosted. Whatever the facts in the case of Mr Venables, that is worrying.

Rehabilitation may be only one function of imprisonment, but it is an important one, for society and the taxpayer as well as the recipient—and the evidence suggests there is too little of it rather than too much. For example, Britain locks up more children in secure detention than any other western European country (though the total has recently fallen a bit), in part, say some, because of the Bulger furore. Yet the resources devoted to them are much scantier than those offered in psychiatric hospitals.

Much the same applies to young adults. Sparing them the “corrosive atmosphere” of adult jail was one reason given for releasing Mr Venables and Mr Thompson in 2001. The atmosphere doesn't seem to have improved all that much since then. The last annual report from the chief inspector of prisons concluded that “the high rate of re-offending among young adult men is unlikely to reduce without significant changes in approach, funding and focus.” Ditto criminals who serve short-term sentences: “Only a small proportion of prison budgets is spent on activity intended to reduce reoffending” by such prisoners, said the National Audit Office this week, “despite the fact that 60%…are reconvicted within a year of release.”

And this costly imbalance—between the alacrity with which politicians imprison people, and the resources available to rehabilitate them—looks set to worsen. The Conservatives, still likely to form the next government, envisage an increase in the prison population under still-tougher sentencing rules; they hope the figures will later come down, though history suggests that it is unlikely. They also talk about a “rehabilitation revolution”. But whether they will find the money for that, while simultaneously building new prisons, already seems doubtful.

The timing doesn't help. Mr Blair's original response to the Bulger murder helped to establish his reputation; Mr Venables has returned into public consciousness just as New Labour seems set to lose office, an eerie bookend to its political supremacy. In some of this week's coverage, the life of this one individual has seemed to serve as a parable for the progress of the country over the last two decades, or the lack of it. The story has captured and conveyed a widespread sense that the things that were supposed to get better haven't, and perhaps, more damagingly, that they couldn't: that there is no escape from the past.





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