In February Joshua Carney, a man with 47 previous convictions, was released from prison early on licence. Five days later, he forced his way into a Cardiff house, locking a terrified woman inside. Her screaming woke her 14-year-old daughter upstairs. Carney raped both daughter and mother in front of each other. On Monday, Carney was jailed for ‘life’; he will be considered for parole in ten years, at the age of 38.
The core principle of British justice isn’t public safety. If it was, Carney would never leave prison.
This isn’t about the preservation of liberty; the threat of crime is a far greater constraint on the average person’s freedom than the threat of prison. Instead, the British justice system is based around an almost pathological need to offer offenders a second chance, and a third, and a fourth, even when these chances come at the cost of somebody else’s chance to live their life free of violence.
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