The Ministry of Justice’s (MoJ) internal research shows just nine per cent of offenders are “prolific”, but they account for more than 10 million offences – around half of all the crimes dealt with by courts each year in England and Wales.
Yet the MoJ figures obtained by The Telegraph show there were 3,377 “super-prolific” criminals in 2021 who were not jailed, even though they had each been previously convicted of more than 50 offences. Of these, 258 had been convicted of more than 100 individual previous offences, but were still not jailed.
How many of these are really just the one conviction with other offences “taken into consideration”?
Very few, I would imagine, considering judges seem to prefer ‘one last chance’ over prison (Unless you misgendered someone on Twitter)
We’ve got you for this one – cop for a dozen or so ‘previous offences’ so we can clear the books and improve our detection rate, and we’ll turn a blind eye to…
What Bernie G says. The “turn a blind eye” also means putting in a good word to the beak, saying how cooperative you’ve been. A while ago I read about a young burglar being driven around by police: “You did this one, and you did that one. Oh, and that one over there…”
Targets, see…
Bernie/Sam – One might wish you were right but I think that although this was doubtless the case in the past, the police are now simply too lazy and utterly indifferent to their clear-up rates. When it comes to burglaries the Police are more or less an adjunct to the ONS and the insurance industry by logging and issuing crime numbers to victims.
Nice to see the Pareto principle at work.
Cheer up. They jailed the old, half-blind simpleton who gestured and shouted at a cyclist on the pavement (who then had the lousy judgement to cycle under a car).
I think you’ll find imprisoning these people is racist.
https://patch.com/illinois/joliet/chicago-carjackers-dumb-mistake-he-drove-will-co-glasgow
On the subject of repeat offenders and risible bail terms here is an unusually happy ending from Joliet Illinois.
@dearieme,
Spot on, +1000. Why didn’t the geriatric cyclist simply stop? What was she doing cycling on the footway anyway?
Bedfordshire police used to send officers loaded with cartons of 200 cigarettes to interview prisoners in Jails to cough up for various burglaries to improve their clear up rate. As far as i’m aware no charges were ever brought against these confessions.
Slightly OT but WTFs going on in Scotland? Under 25s to be given lenient sentences to give them a chance at rehabilitation? If they’re not mature enough to understand the consequences of their actions and face the full tariff they’re not mature enough to vote.