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CAREER CRIMINALS

  • From 2000-2021, 10% of offenders (over half a million offenders across two decades) committed at least 16 offences and these offenders accounted for half of all crimes

  • Theft offences are disproportionately committed by a small number of career criminals. For every 2 offenders with no prior convictions or cautions who are sent to prison for theft, there are 73 offenders with at least 15 previous convictions.
  • In 2024, about 40% of cautions or convictions for knife possession among adults were given to individuals who had previously been cautioned or convicted for the same offence. 

But the state is failing to act - and these career criminals are repeatedly avoiding prison:

  • From 2007-2018:
    • Over 200,000 offenders avoided jail despite having 25 previous convictions;
    • 32,000 avoided jail despite having over 50 previous convictions; and
    • 2,450 avoided jail despite over 100 previous convictions
  • The courts are becoming more lax on career criminals. Since 2018, there have been 50,000 cases of career criminals, with over 50 previous convictions, avoiding jail. In 2023 career offenders with more than 50 previous convictions are five times as likely to avoid jail as they were in 2007

Failure to imprison these career criminals leaves British streets increasingly dangerous. When in prison, career criminals are unable to put the wider public at risk. When just seven members of a bike theft gang in the City of London were arrested and imprisoned in 2020, the number of bike thefts in the City of London fell by 90%. In addition, when the focussed efforts of police in Hemel Hempstead culminated in the arrests of several career criminals, police reports in the area declined by 72%. The same phenomenon was observed when Barnsley police arrested 7 prolific burglars which resulted in a 64% reduction in the number of homes burgled in Goldthorpe over a 6 month period. The most prolific phone thief in London is likely responsible for thousands of phone thefts a year.

Similarly, in New York, nearly a third of all shoplifting arrests in 2022 involved just 327 people. Collectively, these people were arrested more than 6000 times. A study of Sweden's multi-generational register found that 1% of the total population were responsible for 63% of violent crime (3+ violent crime convictions per criminal), and 0.1% were responsible for 19.8% of violent crime (11+ violent crime convictions per criminal). 

In Britain, these career criminals are driving up the cost of living, terrorising our streets and consistently avoiding prison. If these individuals were imprisoned for their offences for commensurate lengths of time, Britain could essentially eradicate a vast swathe of crime overnight. Our streets would be safer, and crime would no longer pay. 

We must change direction to crush the growth in multiple crimes that are spreading like an epidemic across Britain:

  • Phone thefts have increased 150%; with 104,017 cases of phone theft recorded by the Metropolitan police from January 2023 to January 2024. Robbery has increased by nearly 10%.
  • Theft from the person offences were at their highest level in 2024 (over 150,000 offences) since current police recording practices began in 2003.
  • Shoplifting increased by 20% in 2024, to an all-time-high of over 500,000 crimes (but rates of reporting in shoplifting are suspected to be extremely low thus the number is likely much higher), leading to supermarkets introducing security mesh over products, security boxes on chocolate, robot cameras patrolling the aisles and installing 4ft smoke machines to deter criminals at night.
  • In 2024 the Metropolitan Police recorded around 46 knife crimes a day; an increase of 16% from the previous year.
  • Three murders or major sex crimes are committed every week by offenders on probation

Career Offenders

Multiple career offenders are repeatedly avoiding jail:

  • Owen Hill: 76 previous offences, 34 previous convictions (including burglary, robbery, shoplifting, assaults, battery and drug possession). Charged for carrying a blade and resisting a police officer. Hill received a deferred sentence for five months. This was cut to three-month suspended sentence at a following hearing. However, neither prosecution nor Hill informed the judge Hill had committed both shoplifting and drug offences between these two hearings. Following this, Hill again avoided jail - having to pay £200 compensation to the officer he injured and undertake 25 days rehab with a 12 months community order.
  • Joseph Phillips: more than 300 previous offences, more than half for theft. Phillips pleaded guilty to two charges of theft from cars, avoided jail with a 42 week prison sentence suspended for 12 months.

Even those sentenced, after multiple offences and convictions, are often given lax sentences, incommensurate with the level of societal harm they are responsible for (and likely to continue to cause):

  • AWA, R. v [2021] December 2021 - The respondent was sentenced to less than four years (3 years 10 months) for rape despite having 114 previous convictions including dishonesty, burglary, and two offences of violence. The judges deemed all previous convictions not relevant
  • Arthur McLean, within days of being released from prison after receiving just 12 weeks for battery and a public order offence, received just a conditional discharge for his 304th offence. Within days he had shoplifted again and was re-arrested, he was given six weeks jail for each of his most recent theft offences.
  • Tanya Liddle: 499 offences and 172 convictions - she has been banned from the majority of shops in the North East and she has taken to wearing disguises. She has served only half her sentences and was recently released back onto the streets, after a brief three month sentence for contempt of court.
  • Darren Smith: 226 offences, 96 convictions. In preference to sectioning or imprisonment, he has been repeatedly released - and able to terrorise the public, and more specifically, NHS staff. He has recently been re-arrested following an assault on a doctor and lighting a fire in a hospital toilet causing an evacuation of the A&E at Royal Hospital, Halifax. He has been sentenced to 4 years, and is therefore likely out in less than 3.
  • James Bernstead has 129 previous convictions. Bernstead was recently sentenced for 10 thefts and received just 1 year in prison. Whilst on licensed release he committed another theft to fund a drug addiction, threatening female staff. He has been given 2.5 years, meaning he is likely out in under half that time.

Solutions

Catching Career Criminals

Train police in binary search. Trawling through hours of CCTV footage is a waste of police time when binary search can be used to locate the key information in the footage with a fraction of the labour.

Establish a CCTV repository. Allow members of the public to submit recordings captured by their CCTV equipment to a police database which can be used to gather evidence during investigations. The current system for how police handle victims’ videos is a legal and operational mess. 

Give greater discretion under RIPA to authorise police investigations. Police should be granted RIPA authorisation to investigate and pursue career criminals. This includes the wider use of surveillance and GPS tracking when tracking stolen goods.

Use Operation Cross as a template to dramatically reduce crime in an area. Through a combination of the identification of crime hotspots, patrols (plain clothes and high-visibility), collaboration with the local community, the use of Stop and Search powers (PACE 1984), and forced entry to buildings storing stolen goods, police in Hemel Hempstead reduced reports of crime by 72%. Encourage police to tactically use the entire array of powers afforded to them in this manner to apprehend career criminals.

Prioritise and Increase the budget for investigations of theft offences. The average budget for a ‘theft from the person’ offence is £40. Over 90% of phone theft investigations by the Metropolitan Police are closed without a suspect identified. As thefts are the most common type of crime committed by career offenders, a successful theft investigation is likely to have the downstream effect of preventing a huge number of future thefts. Conduct sustained investigations propelled by sting operations akin to the City of London investigation which resulted in the arrests of several members of a bike theft gang, subsequently reducing the number of reports of bike theft from 68 in August 2020 to 7 in January 2021.

Swift Justice for First Time Offenders

Fast, efficient sentences for first time offenders. The faster the feedback loop, the fewer individuals commit crimes - the better our system acts as a deterrent, and shows would-be criminals that police can and will act. More first-time offences must be dealt with, at high priority by the courts, with the least serious resulting in a first time non-custodial sentence - allowing for extreme speed, discouraging future criminality before it becomes career and giving police the power to bring individuals to court, to face community sentences and fines at pace, for first time offences.

Convicting Career Criminals

Amend sentencing guidelines to make clear the more offences a criminal commits, the longer they should stay in prison. Immediate, simple reforms to the sentencing guidelines would see career criminals reflected in sentencing. Replacing language discouraging prison, sentencing guidelines must change to reflect the societal cost of career criminals, as well as the good of imprisonment as a means to limit this cost and damage, and to prevent further criminality from career criminals. This could be passed with the stroke of a pen, and give judges the power to imprison career criminals at speed. For details on our proposed changes to sentencing guidelines, see the Appendix Note.

Legislative change. Government must ensure that each subsequent offence results in a proportionally longer sentence. Judges shall be permitted discretion but the direction of judgements must be made clear: repeat offences increase the time to be served, and the more serious a pattern of behaviour – or the more widespread – the more sentences must compound. More crimes must mean more time.

Solve the bottleneck. Government must build prisons and do so at speed. Focusing on career criminals means utilising the limited space as best we can, but the more prison spaces, the more flexible and responsive our solutions can be.

These solutions would crush the crime rate in Britain, make our streets safer, and ensure that crime no longer pays for career criminals.