Ian Bell on criminal acts

There is a sight, sometimes a depressing sight, that has become commonplace in every town and village in Scotland. You see them on every street, cheerful or morose. They seem, too many of them for my taste, unbearably young. They are girls, sometimes resembling mere children themselves, and each has a pushchair.

Glimpse them and you may well be glimpsing a tale of perfect happiness. That happens. Motherhood is fulfilling, after all. But so is fatherhood, if he sticks around. If he does not, and if the girl has conceived at a very early age, or at too early an age, what you see is a life decided, defined, ended almost as soon as it has begun.

Young mothers deserve respect. In certain cultures, meanwhile, anything other than a teenage pregnancy is unusual. But when I see those processions of pushchairs heading to the shops, one of those stray statistics comes to mind. In Britain, "on average", a woman's age at her first marriage is 30. Someone forgot to tell a very large number of very young girls.

There is another Scottish spectacle, even less cheering but just as common. It is the scene that unfolds on some high street or park when darkness begins to fall and just enough booze has been put away to prove, as our government will remind you, that Scotland has a £2.5 billion alcohol problem.

Adults are afflicted too, obviously enough, but these scenes are peopled by youngsters. Some have reached the legal age and can buy drink freely, if not sensibly. Often enough, though, the girls and boys would not pass for 18. Too often, they would barely pass for teenagers. And if the debris in public places alone is a guide, they are drinking in large, dangerous quantities.

Something should be done. You can say it, I can say it, and politicians can say it with a polished, reflexive confidence. Something, but what? Teenage girls might be better off with a chance at life, or even higher education, before choosing motherhood. Girls under 16 should be protected, above all, until the real meaning of consent is understood. And if not?

Male or female, equally, they should be protected from the seductions of booze cheap as water, from the penury, violence, and abbreviated lives that are washed away as a result. It shouldn't be allowed, should it? Such is the human and economic cost, something must be done, and politicians can take the hit for interfering with the liberties of the individual. That's one of the compromises a society makes: it protects the young, protects itself, and depends on a political class as guarantor.

Describe the problems in that way and things do not seem so complicated. Describe reality and those things become messy. Keep teenagers away from sex until they are deemed ready? There's a problem for the ages. Besides, as a smart teenager would remind you, those mature adults you invoke seem to suffer divorce, and worse, at a remarkable rate thanks to their very mature choices.

Keep youngsters away from booze, then? Keep them away from a recreation still redolent of maturity, fun times, and contact with the opposite sex? Keep them away from a recreation cheaper now than it has ever been? If alcohol is a danger to the young, why - our smart teenager returns - does every rotten TV cookery show come complete with a "wine choice", and every supermarket with an unbeatable booze bargain?

Meanwhile, the grown-ups would reject prohibition en masse. Or rather, they would reject it for themselves. You'll have heard of rebellious teenagers and forbidden fruit? That would be sex and booze, I think. Messy indeed.

Last week, nevertheless, two efforts, a pair of bright ideas aimed at excess youth drinking and underage sex, made a few headlines and enjoyed mixed fortunes. The SNP government proposed, among other measures, to forbid 18 to 21-year-olds from buying drink from off-sales establishments. Meanwhile, it was suggested that girls who have sex before they are 16, consensual or not, should face the same legal consequences as boys who have sex with them. In other words, both activities would be criminalised.

We have become adept at criminalising things. How is that going, by the way? Which is to say: has the perceived quality of anyone's life improved because of Asbos or the arbitrary powers that have been granted to everyone from councils to tax authorities to police and beyond?

It is also to ask: who really benefits if a teenage girl is criminalised? Is she deterred from sex when the only trick is not to get caught? Is she protected from exploitation? Do you render a person mature by planting the idea that her desires are deplorable? A society that mourns the absence of role models might itself be failing to set a decent example. This is not, I hope, what we really mean by equality before the law.

Then we have the youthful boozers. The SNP's scheme was shot to pieces last week, not least by Scotland's students, who made eloquent but obvious points. Old enough to vote, old enough to marry, old enough to die for one's country, but not to be trusted, if the government got its way, with a can of off-sales lager.

At Holyrood, Labour's Iain Gray produced a neat example of what can happen when the attempt to do some good fails to involve logic. An 18-year-old could work in an off-licence, said Gray. That teenager could be managing the establishment. He could even own the shop. But if the proposal were to go ahead, even a modest purchase from his own stock at the end of his shift would render the youngster a criminal.

No-one at Holyrood pointed out - for no party would offend one of our biggest industries - that the SNP is staunch in its support for the whisky trade. Hard luck, then, on a 19-year-old starting his career at the distillery. According to the proposals, he could still drink the stuff at a pub or restaurant, but not if he purchased it from the Old Glen Doom gift shop. The 18-year-old soldier back from Afghanistan would equally remain luckless, and dry.

When you criminalise behaviour, you criminalise a class of people. Often enough, there is no argument over that. Some things will be forever beyond the pale. In other areas - let's say the right to die - attitudes change. The trouble is that criminal sanctions, extended without thought, have consequences. You divide a society between those who decide what is unlawful and those who are deemed, by the first lot, to be behaving unlawfully. And you fill your prisons.

Alex Salmond, first minister, was himself questioning that phenomenon last week. Answering the Tories' Annabel Goldie, Salmond noted that crime rates in Scotland have fallen to their lowest level in 25 years, yet the prison population is bigger than ever. The crime stats are disputed by some, but the broad picture remains. How come?

No-one says that teenage girls or boy boozers would or would not be locked up to begin with. Should either scheme become reality, however, the big difficulty appears: what becomes of repeat offenders? Given the numbers in Scottish jails for minor offences we already know the answer. Even the hypothetical girl-child would find herself in care. For a 15-year-old, that's prison, or as a good as, and too often the first step on the road towards the real thing.

We lock up too many people. We criminalise too many others. In either case, starting them young is rarely a good plan. Alternatives are generally expensive, uncertain, and for a certain sort of moralist deeply unsatisfactory. "Something must be done": who has never thought it? But when the petty laws accumulate, when the "criminal" population grows, when the jails fill but people go on behaving as they have always behaved, you must ask precisely what you have done. Then ask who, exactly, is the better for it.