IT is one of the great mysteries of our time: How can our prisons be full to bursting – to the point where the Justice Secretary is forced to release violent criminals early – when no one ever gets sent to prison any more?
After all, most of our bobbies don’t feel the collar of even one suspect in a typical week on the beat, while the rate for successful prosecutions of a whole array of offences, from rape to shoplifting, is way down in the single digits.
PA:Press AssociationPrisons are bursting – yet barely anyone’s getting banged up. What’s going on?[/caption]
GettyJustice Secretary Shabana Mahmood is planning to free up 1,400 places in prisons[/caption]
Shopkeepers barely bother to report the daily raids on their stores any more, while rape victims routinely wait years for their day in court.
Many victims only call the police to report thefts to get a crime number for their insurance claim, with no hope of even a cursory probe by PC Plod.
Revolving door
So, if most offenders aren’t getting arrested and even fewer are ending up in court, where on earth are all these criminals coming from who are filling our jails to 99 per cent capacity and leaving us, we are told, on the brink of a “total breakdown of law and order”?
It’s a fair question, isn’t it?
The answer is, of course, rather complicated.
For starters, no government, whether Labour or the Tories, has bothered to build enough new prisons for many decades, despite the huge rise in our population.
Added to that, the Conservatives bowed to public demands for longer sentences for the most serious offences, including terrorism and sex crimes.
But for some unfathomable reason they didn’t think that policy would require more cells or, indeed, more prison officers.
Instead they have simply allowed more and more offenders to leave prison after serving just a fraction of their sentence.
As our prison population has grown, we have seen our justice system operate as a revolving door service for repeat offenders, with one in ten felons committing half of all crimes.
Wouldn’t it make sense to focus on them, to lock them away for longer, and not, say, people who write “hurty words” on social media?
Our whole justice system is a failing mess from start to finish.
Soft sentences are handed out far too often to paedophiles, grooming gangs and violent offenders, while Lucy Connolly, a 42-year-old mum and childminder, is serving a 31-month sentence for a tweet.
Who needs a Get Out Of Jail Free card when the Ministry of Justice has a monopoly on madness?
Certainly her post calling for migrant hotels to be set on fire on the day of the Southport attack last July was disgusting but she deleted it herself within a few hours.
And how could it warrant more than two years behind bars when some people who actually took part in last summer’s riots were let off more lightly?
And why on Earth is Connolly, who appealed her sentence on Thursday, still behind bars when Justice Secretary Shabana Mahmood is planning to free up 1,400 places in prisons by releasing inmates, including sex offenders and domestic abusers, months early and limiting recall to prison to just 28 days for any breach of licence?
It defies belief. But then so does the fact that 10,500 of our 88,000 prison population are foreign nationals.
Wouldn’t it make more sense to deport all foreign prisoners immediately upon conviction to serve their full sentences in their home country rather than expecting British taxpayers to pick up the £50,000-a-year tab for jailing them?
Angry words
Albanians make up by far the largest number of overseas felons in our prisons and, by happy coincidence, Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer was in Albania yesterday for talks about tackling organised crime and illegal migrants.
Paedophiles are walking free… but mum, Lucy Connolly, got 31 months for a tweet – where’s the justice in that?PA
I just hope he enjoyed their chicken nuggets more than the son of the convicted Albanian criminal who remains in the UK after he successfully won his battle against deportation in part because of his son’s aversion to “foreign nuggets”.
You couldn’t make any of this stuff up.
Whether it’s freeing prisoners so you can put more offenders behind bars, or handing out jail sentences for angry words but not for violent deeds, or allowing foreign criminals to stay here even after they breach our trust or break our laws, it confounds all reason.
Who needs a Get Out Of Jail Free card when the Ministry of Justice has a monopoly on madness?
BBC guilty in ‘trust crisis’
BBC chief Tim Davie has vowed that the BBC can help tackle the “crisis in trust” in Britain which has led to division and a breakdown of faith in our democratic institutions.
Sorry, Tim, but the BBC isn’t the solution – it is part of the PROBLEM.
BBC boss Tim Davie says he’ll fix Britain’s trust crisis… but the Beeb is not the solution – it’s part of the problemGetty
Whether it has been the blatantly biased reporting about Brexit, climate change propaganda, pushing trans ideology, ignoring legitimate concerns about mass immigration or the failure to hold the Government to account over Covid lockdowns, our state broadcaster has breached our trust too many times.
It is no longer our lovable Auntie Beeb, it’s now our evil stepmother.
And never more so than in its coverage of Gaza and Israel, which fails daily to provide balanced reporting.
It’s no wonder that the BBC’s star presenter Gary Lineker hasn’t been properly held to account for his social media posts, including an openly anti-Semitic Instagram re-post this week, for which he has now apologised.
The outgoing Match Of The Day host has since claimed that anyone who stays “silent” on Palestinian deaths in Gaza is “almost complicit”.
Given that Lineker has seemingly failed to say or post ANYTHING about the Hamas massacre or the hostages still held in Gaza in the 19 months since October 7, by his own logic, I guess that means Lineker must be “complicit” in those crimes.
But we can’t blame Lineker for being misinformed.
He’s probably just been watching too much BBC news.
WEIGHT loss jabs don’t just fight the flab. Apparently they also hold the key to longer life, heralding a “golden age” of medicine.
Whether it’s heart disease, cancer or diabetes, drugs such as Mounjaro, Wegovy and Ozempic are being touted as the cure-all even for people who aren’t overweight, with calls for them to be handed out on the NHS to HALF the population.
But isn’t it all just a little bit too good to be true? The fat jabs don’t even help three in ten people using them to lose weight, unpleasant side-effects are common, and the jab companies’ own trials prove that many patients simply pile the weight back on as soon as they stop taking the drug.
The solution for that, of course, is for everyone to stay on the fat jabs forever. And what a coincidence that this would mean many more billions in profits for the pharmaceutical giants.
I’m no expert but if you really want to lose weight and live longer, then eating less and exercising is proven to be pretty foolproof.
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