Silent Majority Speaks

One knife thug in ten is locked up

By James Slack - Home Affairs Editor - Daily Mail, August 21, 2007

Only one in ten thugs caught with a knife in public is locked up, the Daily Mail can reveal today. Police arrested 8,950 yobs for the offence in 2005 yet, despite Government promises of tough sentencing, only 965 were jailed. The rest escaped with a fine, community sentence or - in 3,000 cases - a caution, our research shows.

Most of those given custody walked out of jail within weeks. Some 850 were sentenced to fewer than sex months - meaning their sentences were automatically halved. Only 26 were sent down for more than a year, of which three were given 18 months or more.

Critics said the soft sentences made a mockery of the Government's efforts to bring spiralling knife crime under control. Muggings involving a blade have more than doubled over the past two years to 175 a day.

The Home Office has raised the maximum jail term for carrying a blade in public from two years to four. Yet few offenders are jailed and the maximum sentence is used in exceptional cases only.

Shadow home secretary David Davis said: "It is bad enough that the Government was so slow to wake up to the need for tougher sentences, taking two years to answer a Conservative call to increase the maximum tariff for knife possession. Now we see that even those weaker powers were not being used to the full. It is disgraceful that so many knife offenders are escaping custody. It is no good having tough laws if the Government doesn't have the will to ensure they are used. This is a direct result of the Government's failure to plan adequate capacity in our prisons."

The Home Office does not publish detailed research on knife crimes so the Daily Mail compiled its figures from information forced out of Ministers using written Parliamentary questions.

Of the 8,944 knife offenders picked up in 2005 by police, 5,957 were sent to court. Of these, only one in six was jailed.

Alf Hitchcock, a Metropolitan Police Deputy Assistant Commissioner, has written to the Sentencing Advisory Panel to demand automatic jail sentences for teenagers caught carrying a blade for the third time. He said: "I would like to see tougher sentencing for simple possession, though this could be based on factors such as previous convictions. For instance, you could have a system of 'three strikes and you're out' when you go to jail if you're caught in possession for the third time."

Norman Brennan, of the Victims of Crime Trust, claimed this did not go far enough. "Three strikes and you're out is a nonsense," he said. "It is a licence to carry on committing knife crime. It should be one strike."

Tory leader David Cameron accused the Government of presiding over policies that had led to 'anarchy in the UK'. He said: "We are not going to deal with anarchy in the UK unless we actually strengthen families and communities. If people break the law, the law should come down on them very toughly. I want to see tough penalties. I want to see our courts have the powers they need. But all of us know and people at home know that tough penalties on their own are not enough. You have got to get behind the crime figures and ask yourself why is it there is so much social disorder and breakdown in Britain. It is because of social breakdown, it's because family breakdown, it's because of a lack of discipline in schools, it's a lack of proper values being taught in the home. We are not really going to solve the crime problem unless we solve the family problem."

Former home secretary David Blunkett said the claim of anarchy was absurd. "These are desperate words from the man who wants to hug a hoodie," he added. "To mask his ongoing troubles, David Cameron is making ridiculous claims about the state of Britain. From a leader of the opposition, this is puerile. Rather than making comments that play to people's worst fears, he should be putting forward constructive ideas which add up to more than a vague appeal to make families more functional and communities more cohesive. Given the Tory record, this really does take the biscuit."

A YOUGOV survey has revealed that half of respondents feel more frightened on the streets than a decade ago. Some 62% said they believed parents should shoulder most of the blame for anti-social youngsters. The survey was carried out in the wake of the death of father-of-three Gary Newlove confronting a gang of yobs outside his Warrington home.