Call for only worst offenders to face court

Only more serious violent criminals should face courts, with low-risk offenders who are arrested offered the option to join a police-run programme that seeks to use the threat of prosecution to them to change their ways, according to the Civitas paper.

If offenders complete the programme, which would include curfews, unannounced home checks and voluntary relocation programmes alongside drug treatment and “psychotherapeutic treatment for past trauma”, proceedings against them would be dropped.

Cambridge University criminologists Professor Lawrence Sherman and Peter Neyroud, a former chief constable of Thames Valley Police, argue that the current legal thinking and court system is too slow and expensive at a time of heavy budget cuts and that its cheaper, faster ideas of “deferred prosecution” should be piloted.

Prof Sherman said the UK needed to get away from what he said was the “Tony Blair method – prosecuting everyone all the time” and get back to ideas he said would have been recognised by Robert Peel, who founded the Metropolitan Police in 1829.

“The idea that everyone has to have their day in court is a recent idea,” he said. “For much of the history of the police, they dealt with a lot of the cases, with recourse to the courts for the most serious cases.

“There is a modern expectation that if there is a crime and an arrest, there has to be an appearance in court and a conviction.

“We are not talking about something new, what we want to do is test it out in modern ways.”

He and Mr Neyroud argue in their paper, Offender-Desistance Policing and the Sword of Damocles, that offenders arrested for low-level crime could be “nudged into compliance” using the threat of prosecution for failure to comply.