Express & Star comment: Sentences slap in face for decency

Those who are decreed to have committed a crime with a racial element rightly face stiff sentences due to their repugnant intentions and motivation.

But what is more despicable than someone conning their way into an elderly person's home and stealing from them?

Sadly, the type of reprobate that carries out this sort of crime does not receive the same sort of treatment that is reserved for other members of the criminal fraternity.

The case of Selina Spencer, who made off with a hard-up pensioner's food and heating money after tricking her way into her home, is all too typical.

The shameless drug addict – who unsurprisingly is no stranger to prison – barged her way into a 67-year-old woman's property and rifled through her purse while she wasn't looking.

The £120 she escaped with was all the pensioner had to live on for the week.

After admitting robbery – her sixteenth conviction no less – Spencer was jailed for a measly three years, meaning she will more than likely be back on the streets in around 18 months time.

This sentence is a proverbial slap in the face for common sense and decency.

Day after day, week after week this newspaper reports on our broken criminal justice system.

A pair of teenage boys brandishing a gun and an axe carried out an armed robbery at a Co-op in Tipton, leaving a shop worker petrified.

Yet once again the courts have handed them pathetically low sentences.

What sort of deterrent does this offer to their peers?

The perpetrators of this awful crime will still be in their teenage years when they are released.

It is highly unlikely that they will become rehabilitated by their relatively short stints behind bars.

You can be certain that the victims of crime receive little comfort when judges are repeatedly dishing out insufficient jail terms.

We make no apology for returning to this issue on a regular basis.

As a newspaper it is our duty to hold to account a criminal justice system that has been allowed to flounder by successive governments for a quarter of a century.

When will our elected MPs realise that getting tough on crime and the causes of crime is a vote winner?

Yes, Tony Blair used that particular soundbite, although like much else of what the former Prime Minister said, he did little to achieve it.

David Cameron and Nick Clegg got nowhere with their laughable hug-a-hoodie crusade.

And now Theresa May seems to be so paralysed by her administration's own internal strife that little is being achieved on any front.

In the meantime, low life parasites such as Selina Spencer continue to carry out their nefarious acts, safe in the knowledge that on the off chance that they are caught, the full force of the law will be little more than a slap on the wrist.

If the issue is prison capacity, then the Government needs to invest in more jails.

Sentences must be reviewed as a matter of urgency. Society needs to be protected from criminal elements.

When he was Home Secretary, Michael Howard memorably stated two of the most sensible words that any politician has ever uttered: Prison works.