The prolific criminals making a mockery of Britain's justice system

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5 days ago

Each morning, on his way to work, Sir Mark Rowley, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, reads a log of the incidents in which police have been involved in the capital over the previous 24 hours. On Tuesday, a significant chunk of his officers' time was spent 'chasing round a teenager who's been involved in machete attacks' and who had 'previously been arrested for firearms and machete offences', said Rowley.
He went on to describe how, despite this being a repeat offence, the system had failed to keep this young man off the streets. 'We sought his remand in custody. Even under the current system he was eventually bailed,' Rowley said in an interview on Radio 4's Today programme. 'He skipped his bail on his tag, we've put massive resources into chasing him round; he's been caught with a machete again. That's going on day in, day out.'
Rowley did not say how many times the teenager with the machete had been arrested before. But this example illustrates how Britain's criminal justice system has become a revolving door for the most prolific criminals. Ministry of Justice (MoJ) statistics show that just 10 per cent of criminals are responsible for around half of all offences. Meanwhile, thousands of prisoners have been released early under a Labour scheme that started in September last year to address an overcrowding crisis in prisons.
Rowley put the issue of 'hyper-prolific' offenders at the centre of a remarkable public intervention by senior officers this week. Six of the country's most senior police chiefs, including the Met Commissioner, wrote an article in The Times newspaper, issuing a direct plea to the Government to make 'substantial investments to bolster police officer numbers, grow specialist police staff nationally and enact major police reforms'. Police have separately told the Government that they will need an extra £300 million in Rachel Reeves' first spending review on June 11. Without it, they argue, Labour's ambitious targets to halve knife crime and violence against women and girls in a decade will not be met.
There are likely to be more challenges to come. An independent sentencing review by David Gauke, the former Conservative justice secretary, published last week by the Government, proposes that some prisoners should be released after serving just one third of their sentences and that custodial sentences of less than 12 months should be largely scrapped. As a result of Gauke's recommendations, which were accepted by ministers almost wholesale, even more policing power will be needed to tackle offenders who would previously have been in prison – and, many argue, should still be behind bars. Rowley said he does not take the decision to wade into politics 'lightly'. But a stretched police force is in no fit state to take on a new wave of early releases, given reoffending rates stand at around 30 per cent.
'Every time you put an offender in the community, a proportion of them will commit crime [and] will need chasing down by the police,' Rowley said. Meanwhile, the decision to release prisoners early, under the current scheme, was made 'without any analysis of the impact on policing whatsoever'.
Worryingly, statistics show criminals with multiple offences are no more likely to be jailed than first-time offenders – a phenomenon dubbed 'more crime, less time'. According to research from the Policy Exchange think tank published in 2023, less than half of 'hyper-prolific' offenders (those who have 45 or more previous convictions) and less than a quarter of 'prolific' offenders (those with 16 previous convictions or more) are sent to prison when convicted of offences that are sufficiently serious to be tried in a Crown Court.
Since 2007, roughly 50,000 career criminals with over 50 previous convictions have been spared jail, including 4,000 people who had over 100 previous convictions, according to MoJ data obtained via parliamentary questions.
Astonishingly, when Conservative MP and shadow education minister Neil O'Brien crunched the numbers, he found that MoJ statistics show people convicted of theft, drug offences and common assault and battery were handed shorter sentences if they had a greater number of previous offences.
'A massive chunk of crime is caused by a small minority of criminals,' says O'Brien. 'A lot of these people will be the people who would be handed short sentences, which are now set to be banned. They will be out in the community, able to cause even more misery and commit even more crime… policy is going in literally the wrong direction.'
Striking examples of hyper-prolific offenders avoiding jail include Tanya Liddle, who in October last year avoided prison for her 172nd conviction (most of which were theft-related), and Carey Lyons, who in 2023 was handed a suspended sentence after being convicted of 15 charges of possessing indecent images of children, despite having a staggering 100 previous convictions, many of them for sex offences. Craig Nicholson, from Gateshead, meanwhile, was given a community order rather than a custodial sentence for theft in 2023, despite 343 previous convictions. Similarly, Warren Russell, from the Isle of Wight, was in 2022 given an eight-week suspended sentence for theft, despite racking up 115 previous convictions, mainly for shoplifting.
Is the solution simply more money for policing, as Rowley and his colleagues are appealing for? Many of the arguments made by the police chiefs on Tuesday have been made repeatedly over the last decade – albeit largely behind closed doors – to both Conservative ministers and their Labour successors. In the same radio interview, Rowley said policing is 'carrying the scar tissue of years of austerity cuts and the effects of that. Forces are much smaller when you compare the population they're policing than they were a decade or 15 years ago.' While the overall police budget has increased by 5 per cent (up to £889 million) for the next financial year, demand for police resources is rising by 5 per cent a year nationwide, according to Rowley: 'Five per cent more people are calling 999 looking for help from police. That's a massive number, and that compounds year on year.'
O'Brien recognises the significance of this 'extraordinary' intervention from police chiefs, but disagrees that funding is the sole issue. 'What the police are doing and how their time is used is as relevant as total resources,' he says. 'It's not just non-crime hate incidents (NCHIs), but how much time police spend attending mental health incidents, sitting in A&E, and being stuck in bureaucracy.'
Meanwhile, an increasing number of potentially dangerous 'prolific' offenders will be released early – or else, avoid jail entirely. 'There is genuine and widespread concern about the impact of the sentencing review on community safety in an already overloaded system,' says Ian Acheson, a former prison governor and director of community safety at the Home Office. 'The police have had more money, this is true, but compared to population growth per capita they are seriously underfunded.'
Sir Keir Starmer came to power last summer with ambitious aims for the criminal justice system: to 'take back our streets', halve serious violence, and tackle violence against women and girls. The blame can't be placed solely at the door of the current Government for the status quo. 'We have a system that is falling apart – feral, violent, and awash with drugs,' says Acheson. 'Labour have inherited this mess – for once, that's true.' It won't be fixed, however, until more crime means more time, not less.
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