Hull's serial shoplifters are just tip of the iceberg for unchecked criminality across the country: David Behrens
You don’t want to be told over your toast and marmalade what the manager of a local Tesco said about the serial shoplifters who treated his store as if it were an all-you-can-eat buffet. His statement was read out in open court but even so, this is a family newspaper. So I will substitute an old Yorkshire expression.
He said they were taking the rise. There was no other way to put it. They would arrive like plagues of insects, fill their pockets and then come back for more. One particular pair had been in several times in a single day. It was asking too much of the staff to intervene and risk getting hurt; safer just to watch the goods vanish before their eyes.
The thieves knew this very well and took advantage. The chances of apprehension were slight and a severe punishment even slighter.
But on this occasion the police had intervened and a few days later two bedraggled figures shambled into Hull Magistrates’ Court where their long criminal records preceded them. They could have been sent to prison but the proceeds of their spree barely amounted to the cost of their bus fares. So they were handed back to the probation service.
Low-level crime like this barely nudges the needle of national consciousness. But there is a lot of it and taken together it helps explain why the prisons are full.
That’s why the Government wants to make more criminals serve their sentences in the community. It would ensure there is room enough for the most dangerous offenders, said the Ministry of Justice as it sought to blame the previous Government for leaving behind “prisons in crisis, close to collapse”.
This was disingenuous given that the job of recommending change had been given to a former Conservative Justice Secretary, David Gauke. If the Tories were indeed guilty of neglect, here was the criminal returning to the scene of the crime.
“We will never put the public at risk by running out of prison places again,” said an MoJ statement which failed to add that it would put us at risk instead by letting the criminals remain in the house next door.
Shabana Mahmood, the current Justice Secretary, tried to placate the ‘hang ’em and flog ’em’ lobby with the idea of chemical castration for sex offenders. That’s not as draconian as it sounds; the effect wears off once you stop making the medicine.
But it served to divert attention from Gauke’s proposition that fewer criminals should serve jail time and those who did would be let out even earlier than before. It was a long way from the Conservative mantra of a generation ago, when the party leader Michael Howard famously insisted that “prison works”.
This time the principal opposition to Gauke’s proposals came not from his former Tory colleagues but from the police and MI5 who thought releasing prisoners any earlier was fundamentally unsafe. West Yorkshire’s Chief Constable John Robins was among those citing “growing social volatility” and “online threats”.
All of that is true: we are bound to feel less safe if we know that more criminals are on the streets. But when we punish a convicted offender we’re really just locking the cell door after the horse has bolted; the key to reducing crime in the long term is to deter people from criminality in the first place. And in that respect the London Mayor Sir Sadiq Khan was closer to the mark this week when he advocated the decriminalisation of owning small quantities of cannabis.
This is a contentious issue but almost everyone in law enforcement agrees that drug use is endemic in every strata of offending, from international dealerships to those wretched shoplifters at Tesco who steal pennyworths of goods they can sell to fund their habits because, you know, every little helps. Remove the crime and you remove the criminality, that’s the theory.
Khan had commissioned yet another ex-Justice Secretary, the Labour peer Charlie Falconer, to investigate and he concluded our cannabis laws are “disproportionate to the harm it can pose”. He wants to legalise small amounts for personal use while continuing to prohibit selling and manufacturing. The police, he says, should focus on the dealers and not the users.
It won’t happen, though. Neither the Government nor the police support any move towards deregulation, arguing that drugs are inseparable from violence and that cannabis is merely a nursery slope to harder, more damaging substances.
So there’s the dilemma: if we won’t embrace liberalism we must accept the inevitability of more people being locked up for longer, no matter how crowded their cells. That is the contradiction policymakers are going out of their way to avoid. Are they taking the rise?