Express & Star comment: Approach to crime is shambolic

Could there be a better demonstration of the madness affecting law and order in this country than the utterly barmy comments from Justice Minister Rory Stewart?

In a quite astonishing intervention, he has called for prison sentences of under a year to be scrapped – just what the public wants to hear as the country struggles to cope with a violent crimewave.

Sadly, this is the kind of wrong-headed thinking that lies at the very heart of our failing criminal justice system, and causes so much misery for people in the real world. It also comes at a time when official figures show the prison population in Britain is at its lowest level in five years.

Mr Stewart said the Government is planning for it to rise by 10,000 to 93,000, stating that the public was likely to demand tougher sentences for burglars in the future.

This is a telling observation, because it shows that those in authority are aware of the huge disquiet among the tax-paying millions about soft sentences.

For a Tory administration to have presided over such a shambolic approach to law and order would have been unthinkable in previous years.

However, there is little true Conservatism about Theresa May’s administration. Oh, for a return to the days of Michael Howard, the Home Secretary who uttered the immortal words: “Prison works.”

He summed up the way that many people feel about justice. Not only does prison work in providing a deterrent to the miscreants who want to commit crimes, but it also takes criminals off our streets.

This has the added benefits of seeing the crime rate drop drastically, and as a result makes law abiding citizens feel safer.

Protecting ordinary people must always be the top priority for the criminal justice system, and it is about time that politicians from all parties came to terms with that message.

Law and order should never be used as a political football, booted around by MPs eager to score cheap points off those from across the House.

Unless our law makers start taking this issue seriously, the public will continue to lose faith in our criminal justice system.