Fifteen years ago, at the tail end of Blairism, I was running things for the Home Office in Southwest England. We had well-funded schemes across the region to tackle ‘prolific and other priority offenders’ (PPOs) who were torturing communities with crime. It seems almost quaint in the present context to recall the enthusiasm and effectiveness of the five local constabularies on my patch to prosecute the ‘catch and convict’ strand of the strategy. Rates of reoffending plummeted. The aim was straightforward: make life impossible for those engaged in criminal impunity. Those determined criminals who committed disproportionate levels of burglaries and shoplifting were harried from the moment they left their front doors. The message was uncompromising – give up or get banged up.
These days we seem to be doing the opposite with a crippled and compromised criminal justice system unwilling and unable to grip volume crime. Policing and crime commissioners replaced bureaucrats like me. Their national lead for shoplifting, Katy Bourne, has described the ‘madness’ of a system that lets thieves be arrested multiple times before ending up in prison. ‘There is no point arresting shoplifters if there is no effective deterrent,’ she said.
A new generation of police chiefs promoted on a fealty to progressive crime theory hasn’t helped
According to the Telegraph, more high-volume offenders than ever before recorded are avoiding prison. Either side of last year’s general election, senior judges and the Ministry of Justice were actively promoting this outcome in advice and directions to sentencers. This was not primarily misguided lenience on criminals who hold poor communities hostage, though we will come to that mindset later. It was and remains a simple matter of logistics – there’s nowhere to put them.
The Labour government’s increasingly desperate and hapless series of emergency mass release schemes hasn’t helped this perception, though they would argue it was the only way to play the hand dealt to them by the outgoing administration. Years of ideological vandalism and starvation of resources to our penal system meant that we were days away from jail gridlock. Moreover, sending prolific offenders into places wrecked with violence, drugs and indolence is an almost certain guarantee that they will come out worse. Prisons are places where a significant number of low-level offenders go in clean and come out addicted to drugs. This in turn fuels more offending to feed habits or just to live when all the money for food has been snorted, injected or smoked.
Whether or not one chooses to label such offenders as ‘scumbags’ is a moot point. They have been allowed to proliferate and grow emboldened by a sclerotic and toothless system that cannot punish them effectively. This won’t detain our criminal justice lanyard boss class who don’t tend to live in postcodes marooned in criminality with their lifeblood corner shops overwhelmed and closing. The disconnect between behaviour and consequence is rarely observed in the aisles of Waitrose.
It’s just as well retribution has become a dirty word because we have now ‘understood’ offenders to the point where they are running rings around us. A new generation of police chiefs promoted on a fealty to progressive crime theory hasn’t helped. As we’ve seen across the country in recent weeks on illegal migration, it’s cheaper to fatuously emote on the Human Rights Act than put hands on. Far better to police messages in shop windows with hurty words than feel the collars of the thieves who are closing them down.
So if jails make shoplifters worse and lenient sentences simply embolden them, what’s the answer? It’s not the usual pallid fare served up by people like David Gauke, who is the latest in a long line of grandees co-opted by the government to give policy a cross-party patina. We’ve been discussing and advocating community punishments for years despite little evidence that they have any impact on this class of prolific offenders. The public expect to see thieves locked up and, where possible, rehabilitated.
But we need a completely different approach to the 60 to 70 per cent of shoplifters that research consistently shows are motivated by addiction to crack and heroin. Either acting alone or directed by organised crime, they are the scourge of poor neighbourhoods. Directing them into secure NHS treatment facilities to treat the addiction and keep them safe from further offending is the answer crying out for political adoption. We can build our way out of this problem, just not in the way the government thinks.
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