The Conservative party has had an idea. It’s not a very good idea, but it’s an idea and those are rare for the Tories. The idea is to start banging up repeat shoplifters and other low-level offenders.
Transport minister Richard Holden has complained that ‘the police haven’t concentrated enough on some of these offences’ even though ‘they really do have a huge impact on our high streets and shops right across the country’. Without invoking the term, the minister was calling for an amped up version of broken windows policing, stamping out petty crimes that undermine public confidence and encourage more serious offending. So far, so 1980s right-wing criminology.
No. 10 may like the headlines but No. 11 won’t like the bottom line
The past year has seen 339,206 instances of shoplifting, though the British Retail Consortium claims the figure is closer to eight million and estimates the annual cost at £953 million. So, while it’s a low-level crime it is prevalent and causes significant economic harm.
Where the theft is of low value (under £200) and the offender deemed at lesser culpability, sentencing council guidelines set a modest fine (25-75 per cent of weekly income) as the starting point punishment. As monetary value and culpability increase, the penalty rises to community orders and eventually custody. If these remedies are inadequate, and given reoffending rates they plainly are, it doesn’t necessarily follow that prison is the answer.
Advocates of custodial sentences reason that they would incapacitate offenders, thus preventing repeat offences. This argument sounds convincing but it swiftly hits a number of buffers. Short sentences are ineffective at reducing reoffending, not least because they don’t provide enough time for rehabilitation, and particularly for shoplifting, 70 per cent of which is motivated by drug misuse. Putting a drug addict in prison is like sentencing an alcoholic to 12 months down the off-licence.
Parallel to this is the crime ‘U effect’, whereby placing low-level offenders in prison exposes them to hardened criminals from whom they learn how to become more serious or effective criminals. It’s difficult to quantify but one US study found that ‘individuals with an incarceration history earn significantly higher annual illegal earnings than those who do not have such a history’.
Shoplifting is also a more female crime, with women accounting for 21 per cent of all prosecutions annually but 28 per cent of retail theft prosecutions. Jailing more shoplifters would mean jailing more women, with the family impact that brings given that up to one-fifth of jailed women in England and Wales are mothers of dependent children. Impacts include not only the emotional trauma of separation and upheaval in the child’s life but ‘an increased likelihood of criminal offending, mental health problems, drug/alcohol addiction’ and likelihood ‘to die before the age of 65’.
A more effective solution, and certainly a better investment of public resources, would be to adopt the Centre for Social Justice’s Second Chance programme, which advocates targeting the 10,000 most prolific drug-dependent shoplifters for residential rehabilitation. Another approach is that taken by the London Women’s Diversion Service, a joint police-charity initiative that assigns female shoplifters to support programmes rather than prison. Women on these programmes have a reoffending rate of just six per cent, compared to the national average for women of 23 per cent.
If we are still determined to put more people in prison, thus creating more criminals and more crime, we will have to be prepared to make substantial investment in the prison estate. It costs £47,000 to keep one person in prison for one year and England’s 85,000 current inmates are expected to rise to between 93,000 and 106,000 by 2027. Overcrowding will be exacerbated by custodial sentences for shoplifters because the charge rate for shoplifting is 3.5 times that for theft as a whole. No. 10 may like the headlines but No. 11 won’t like the bottom line.
Holden waves away concerns about overcrowding, saying: ‘If we need to build more prison places for them, then so be it.’ This cavalier attitude could not be more on-brand for this government. A decade of austerity and its social consequences but now they’re willing to shell out with an election around the corner. It is offensive to be governed by such flippant, insubstantial people.
The broken windows theory of policing is contentious. As Katy Balls writes in this week’s cover piece, broadly speaking, law enforcement, civic leaders and business tend to favour it while academics argue that it doesn’t work. We needn’t come down on either side of that debate to conclude that this government’s thinking is as shallow as its leadership is negligent. It requires either a deficit of self-awareness or a surplus of gall to wear the social safety net down to its barest threads then announce that something must be done about the entirely predictable consequences.
This government imposed socially destructive austerity and welfare brutalism. They cut 20,000 police officers and reduced real-terms policing budgets by one-fifth. They crammed prisons dangerously over capacity and cut 5,000 prison officers in the five years of the coalition. They reduced the justice budget overall by a quarter. They presided over an 800,000 increase in child poverty among working families. They have been in office while the annual number of food parcels distributed by the Trussell Trust has risen by a factor of 31. They handed out 541,000 Universal Credit sanctions in the past year alone.
They dragged thousands more into financial precarity while stripping away the services and relationships that held together the poorest and most dysfunctional communities with public policy Scotch tape. They closed 1,400 SureStart centres, abolished the Health in Pregnancy Grant, and shut 750 youth centres. They have seen addiction services funding drop by £220 million, drug-related mortality rise by 61 per cent and have scrapped 25 per cent of mental health beds. They oversaw a 169 per cent growth in rough sleeping in their first eight years in power.
They put the ideology of Treasuryism ahead of proper conservative concerns like opportunity, social cohesion, family stability, public order and the common good. They lowered college funding by 14 per cent. They cut adult skills and education budgets by 38 per cent. They shuttered 10 per cent of JobCentres in the space of three years.
Of course the windows are broken. The Tories broke them.
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