Lawrence Newport: The revolving door of justice is breaking Britain’s social contract

Dr Lawrence Newport Founder of Crush Crime and co-founder of LFG.

In communities across Britain, there’s a quiet anger building – and it’s completely justified. You see it in high streets blighted by theft, in residents forced to install CCTV on their own homes, in the weariness of shopkeepers who’ve stopped bothering to report crimes because the same offenders keep coming back.

But above all, you see it in the loss of faith, a growing belief that justice simply doesn’t exist.

At Crush Crime, we’ve been compiling data, case studies and stories from across the country to understand what’s going wrong. The answer is stark: our justice system is broken, abused consistently by a small group of career criminals committing the majority of crimes.

In case after case, we see offenders with 50, 80, 100 or more convictions receiving tiny prison sentences, or even simply walking free without jail time. The public is made less safe, the criminals simply continue – and the state lets it happen.

The numbers should shake any policymaker out of complacency. Around ten per cent of offenders are responsible for over half of all recorded crime. These are the career criminals with long-standing patterns of theft, burglary, assault and anti-social behaviour.

And yet, magistrates and judges are still routinely handing down short sentences – often less than 12 months – which do nothing to prevent reoffending. In fact, over half of these sentences to less than a year reoffend within 12 months. Worse still, these short sentences are often reduced further by automatic early release, meaning the public may face an offender back on their streets within weeks.

This isn’t justice, and the public remain unprotected from this continued criminality. We’ve seen the results: we now suffer the highest numbers of shoplifting and theft since records began. The government and our services have given up.

Critics of firm sentencing tend to talk in abstract terms. They say prison doesn’t work. That short sentences are disruptive. That rehabilitation must come first – and in the right context, they’re right; at Crush Crime we don’t advocate stuffing prisons full of first-time shoplifters or struggling addicts.

But we must be brave enough to make a clear distinction between someone who made a mistake and someone who makes crime a career. There is a point – and it’s being made repeatedly in courtrooms every day – where leniency becomes enabling of criminality and pushes the risk back onto the public.

This matters because justice is about victims, it’s about communities and it’s about the wider social contract that says the state will protect you and your family from those who do you harm. When that promise is broken – when victims see their abuser or burglar walk free for the fifth, tenth or twentieth time – society fractures.

People stop reporting crimes. They stop trusting the police. And they stop believing that justice is even possible – and they’re right to do so, unless our system changes.

The irony is that longer sentences are not just about protecting the public from violent, dangerous and career criminals; they’re also about giving rehabilitation a chance for the few it might be effective for.

The reality is that it is impossible to address drug addiction, severe mental health problems, or antisocial behaviours in a few weeks behind bars. For career criminals, a longer sentence is often the only chance they have to access the kind of sustained intervention that might help some of them change whilst, crucially, ensuring the public is safe from their offending. But right now, we’re giving them a revolving door instead of a road to reform.

Far from progress, the government’s recent review of short sentencing risks entrenching the very problem it claims to solve. By pushing for a presumption against custodial terms under 12 months, ministers are signalling that even career criminals should be spared prison.

At Crush Crime, we are demanding that we need mandatory sentence escalation for repeat offenders. We need an end to automatic release for dangerous criminals, violent criminals and those with long criminal histories. Most of all, we need political will: the courage to put the safety of the law-abiding majority ahead of the sensitivities of elites that wish to defend the very criminals that are tearing apart our social fabric.

We also need transparency. It should not be as difficult as it currently is to find out how many people with dozens of previous convictions are being sentenced to little or no time in custody. Courts must be made to publish these figures routinely. Public trust depends on it. And public confidence is collapsing – not because of headlines or hysteria, but because of the reality in towns and cities across our country.

The first principle of any government here must be the protection of the British people.  That means being unashamed in defending the public’s right to feel safe, to seek justice, and to demand consequences for crime. If that moral clarity is lost, the conservatives risk losing not just elections, but the soul of our communities.

The choice is simple: keep feeding the revolving door, or close it for good. At Crush Crime, we know where we stand. It’s time the justice system, and the political system, did too.