Tories Go Soft on “Low-Level” Crime To Free Up Prison Space

The British government has spent recent weeks working to look tough on crime, only now to announce that fewer so-called “low-level” criminals are to be sent to prison. Reports say they will be made to “clean up graffiti and plant forests instead.”

Sentence changes come amid reports of prisons being under “intense” pressure due to a shortage of spaces—in fact, a tenth of English and Welsh prisons aren’t fit to be open at all due to outdated infrastructure, according to a top government official. It appears then that new measures are being adopted not because ministers think they are right but because they simply cannot fit any more criminals into existing prisons.

Reports describe the plans as “Texas-style,” due to the state’s partial shift to rehabilitation. The phrase, particularly in relation to crime, is likely however to muster up images not of probationary classes but of armed police and the death penalty in the minds of Britons. That is, particularly heavy-handed rhetoric is being used to justify (or possibly disguise) more weak-willed measures that will result in fewer “low-level” criminals being locked up.

And what, exactly, does “low level” mean? This is most often left undefined but is bound to refer to crimes that are still capable of causing lasting damage and upset, despite the euphemistic title.

Defending the measures, Tom Franklin, chief executive of the Magistrates Association charity, said it is better to keep “low-level” criminals out of prison, including for their victims, though there was no explanation for this claim. 

He told the BBC that short prison sentences are “very rarely” successful because they do not provide enough time or resources for “reform” or “rehabilitation,” and so result in an increased likelihood of these individuals reoffending. He said much less about punishment or the benefits of deterrence, and also ignored the fact that by the time many individuals are imprisoned for “low-level” crime, they have already become hardened criminals due to having not received proper punishments for a string of earlier offences. Peter Hitchens details this often-overlooked reality in his book The Abolition of Liberty.

It is also worth noting that the tougher measures being brought in alongside this do not always match up to the rhetoric surrounding their introduction.

Justice Secretary Alex Chalk said Britain needs to “think again about how we manage [prison] population pressures in the long term, so there are always ­sufficient spaces to lock up the most dangerous criminals.” He added that “we need to keep people safe—and that means moving away from short-term prison sentences that make hardened criminals rather than rehabilitated offenders. So we need to look again at low-level offenders.”