The best way to stop violent crime? Put criminals in prison for longer.
There’s no point hiring more police if we release the dangerous people they work hard to arrest
You might recently have read about the trial of Sean Robinson, who two years ago attacked a couple in Sunderland who were out on a first date. Unprovoked, Robinson punched and kicked the man, beating him until he lay unconscious. Robinson told the woman he would refrain from killing the man only if she’d have sex with him. He raped her.
In court last week Robinson was jailed for five years, of which he must serve only two-thirds in custody, with an extended licence period of a further three years. The Attorney General is considering sending the case to the Court of Appeal for review under the Unduly Lenient Sentence scheme, but less than one in six such appeals lead to an increase in sentence. As things stand, Robinson, who was 17 at the time of the attack, will be released from prison still in his early 20s.
For a crime so despicable, for a criminal prepared to do such evil, for a monster who has changed the lives of his victims forever, this sort of sentence is patently unacceptable. But it is a testament to the times in which we live. Violence is treated as a fact of life, especially in urban areas. Crimes that would have prompted national introspection and debate 10 years ago now pass with little comment. Believing that criminals should be punished and removed from society where they might otherwise do further harm is treated as an old-fashioned, low-status opinion. We are told that prison is barbaric, and instead of punishing criminals, we must try to understand and rehabilitate them.
The trouble is that this is complete nonsense. There is simply no evidence that the rehabilitation of prisoners works. In the words of Sir Martin Narey, former director general of the prisons service, “The things we did to prisoners, the courses we put them on, the involvement of charities, made little or no difference.” His advice to ministers and policy makers: “Stop fretting about rehabilitation. Politely discourage those who will urge you to believe that they have a course which can undo the damage of a lifetime.”
Official statistics show that around half of all adult prisoners are reconvicted of another offence within one year of release from prison. This is not, as do-gooders like to argue, evidence that prison does not work. Nor does it suggest prisons need to provide more or better rehabilitation. Instead, it is evidence of the futility of believing we can turn around the lives and characters of criminals capable of long lists of repeat offences and extreme acts of violence.
As Michael Howard famously said, prison works. It works as a punishment and as a practical way of taking dangerous and habitual offenders out of circulation, preventing them from doing harm to the rest of us. There will be quibbles about correlation and causality, but take a moment to examine two graphs side-by-side. First, the prison population, which after decreasing for four consecutive years, started to rise after Howard became home secretary in 1993. Second, the crime survey, which shows crime rising before falling dramatically from 1995 onwards. As the numbers sent to prison increased, so crime fell.
And yet we are failing to heed the lesson. Research by the Conservative MP, Neil O’Brien, shows that only a tenth of offenders commit over half of all crimes. And within this cohort, a group of “super-prolific” criminals are responsible for an even greater share of offences. Taking these offenders out of circulation by putting them behind bars should be an easy win for ministers and officials working to cut crime. But this is not what is happening.
Incredibly, O’Brien’s research shows that the number of offenders with more than 50 previous convictions who were convicted but not sent to prison rose from 1,299 in 2007 to 3,196 in 2018. The number of offenders with over 100 convictions but still avoided jail doubled to 295. Over the years of the study, 206,000 criminals with 25 previous convictions avoided prison for their next offence. Instead, more were handed community sentences.
It is true that overall crime, and even overall violent crime, fell through this period. But in too many places criminality and violence continue to be real problems. The end of pandemic restrictions saw knife crime offences go back up by 11 per cent, for example, and according to official statistics released last week, knife crime is up by more than half in the last decade. Yet last year not even one in three people convicted of these crimes were given custodial sentences.
None of this is to argue that we should be mindlessly thuggish in response to thuggery. Prison works, and it needs to play its part in an intelligent and genuinely coherent justice system. Some 41 per cent of prisoners witnessed domestic violence as children, 24 per cent had been taken into care, and nearly half have no school qualifications. If we can fix just some of our social problems we can help to cut crime. Equally, probation services should be much better. Only half of released prisoners have settled accommodation on release, more than one in six end up homeless or sleeping rough, and after a year on the outside fewer than one in five have jobs.
But if we really want to put the law on the side of the public, we have to stop seeing criminality as inevitable and treating criminals as victims who only need to be understood. And we have to make sense of the criminal justice system.
It is madness to recruit more police officers to arrest more dangerous and prolific criminals, only to release them back out on to the streets again. We need the police, prosecutors and prison officers all working together towards the same goal: the prevention of crime achieved by the incarceration of criminals.
It has become unfashionable to say so, but common sense and experience tell us that prison works. It will work bett DT.er still if we are prepared to put more criminals behind bars – and for longer.
