22-05-2025
Uncontrolled crime is bankrupting Britain
Reading about criminal justice in Britain brings to mind ritual slaughter in ancient Greece. Killing a working ox was forbidden, but the sacrifice still had to be carried out. The compromise was simple: after a brief ceremonial trial, the knife used in the murder was found guilty, and thrown into the sea.
Individual guilt was discharged, and life could carry on as before.
It's at this point that the parallel breaks down. In Britain, the knife is blamed, or the retailer who sold it, or the fact that the blade had a point.
Regulations are passed, societal guilt is discharged, hard decisions are avoided, and then life goes on for those who survive, while others continue to die preventable deaths at the hands of sociopathic criminals.
This pattern is repeating itself again this week. The sentencing review published on Thursday tells judges to make greater use of 'community-based alternatives' to prison, with shoplifters and criminals convicted of assault among those to benefit from greater lenience.
At the same time, campaigners are attempting to make the case that in order to cut knife crime, we need to make sure every knife sold in Britain is blunted at the end.
I have every sympathy with those who want to stop something like Southport happening again. But the lesson there wasn't that kitchen knives up and down the country should be handed in as part of a great criminal amnesty.
It was that the state needed to make use of the tools it already had. If a teenager is caught by police carrying a knife on public transport, and repeatedly referred to Prevent, they shouldn't be left free to carry out an attack.
The lesson, in other words, isn't that we need to make life fractionally worse for everyone in exchange for a minimal reduction in risk. It's that we need targeted policing of the people who pose the greatest threat.
This is a point that the Government is curiously resistant to internalising.
Take 'Martyn's law', named after a victim of the Manchester Arena bombing. Among other measures, this regulation requires tiny venues to set out plans for dealing with terror attacks. This red tape is expected to cost businesses around £1.8bn, with an upper estimate of £4.9bn.
The benefits, on the other hand, are between £8 mand £41m, mostly arising through the coincidental effects of CCTV and security guards in deterring crime; there is no actual evidence available for the law's effect on terrorism.
Predictably, this is already making Britain a poorer, gloomier place, with a 150-year-old flower show among the law's victims.
Then again, attempting to crack down on criminals imposes cost and inconvenience on the state, whereas red tape and regulation imposes it on everyone else. And so red tape and regulation is what we get, with no actual measurable reduction in risk.
Terrorism is an extreme form of criminality, and this law is an extreme form of the general government response of regulating potential victims rather than redoubling policing of potential criminals. But the pattern holds across the distribution; we accept the state bending and warping society to minimise the damage offenders are able to inflict rather than demanding it works harder to keep us safe. And in the process, we accept billions of pounds of economic damage.
What would an alternative approach look like? What if we attempted to cut crime rather than cut costs?
Around the world, studies have found that a tiny fraction of offenders account for a vastly disproportionate share of criminal behaviour.
In Sweden, for instance, just 1pc of the population accounts for over 63pc of all violent offences. In Britain, the distribution is similarly skewed: a small group of around 526,000 people – less than 1pc of the population – accounted for around 44pc of all convictions and cautions handed out between 2000 and 2021, averaging roughly 20 such punishments each.
We know, also, that reoffending is rife. Around 26pc of those released from British prisons will reoffend within a year, and the longer the follow-up period is, the higher the reoffending rate rises. By 2009, over 70pc of those convicted in 2000 had been convicted of another offence.
In other words, the pathway to a safer society is finding the extreme outliers, and jailing them. And we can put together a back of the envelope illustration of how much this could be worth. One study in the US found that raising incarceration rates by around 10pc would cut levels of violent crime by 4.6pc, and property crime by 2.5pc.
Say, briefly, that these rates applied in Britain. In exchange for an additional 10,000 or so prisoners, we would see massive reductions in criminality.
Putting a value on this is hard, but not impossible. In 2015-2016, for instance, the then-government calculated that crime against businesses and individuals was costing Britain roughly £59bn each year, with violent crime accounting for the majority.
Uprate this figure for inflation, and it's in the region of £81bn.
As researchers at Policy Exchange have noted, this figure is incomplete: only some crimes against businesses are included, and crimes against the public sector are left out entirely.
Using their estimates, a 2.5pc reduction in crime against businesses would be worth £1bn a year on its own. At a cost to the state of about £57,000 per prison place.
That's a roughly 2:1 benefit to cost ratio before we even begin to consider reduced crime against people; the value of tens of thousands of fewer violent offences, thefts, robberies and burglaries each year.
Sometimes the solution to a problem is staring you in the face. We've trusted our population to cook with pointed knives and hold small fairs for centuries. Rather than restricting these liberties, we should be restricting those we offer to the criminal classes.
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