NO JAIL FOR THIEVES IN BRITAIN?

Sounds like British shops are becoming a free cafeteria

Serial shoplifters should never be sent to prison, the Government's advisers on sentencing said. They want judges and magistrates barred from locking up the petty thieves - no matter how many offences they have committed in the past. If their recommendations are adopted, only those who commit violent attacks on staff, work in organised gangs or use children to steal from shops would go to jail. At the moment, the maximum sentence for shoplifting is seven years. The attempt to cut the severity of penalties is being made by the Sentencing Advisory Panel, a Home Office body which provides recommendations on how to deal with offenders. Their plan would mean 13,000 fewer criminals each year would be sent to prisons at a time when jail overcrowding has reached crisis point.

But the suggestion provoked a new row over shoplifters - the most common breed of criminal to appear before the courts - to add to the furore over punishments for murderers, burglars and sex offenders. Retail trade chiefs, who calculate shoplifting adds £1 a week to the average family's bills, said they were "disgusted" with the scheme and called it "a licence to steal".

The panel - which advises Lord Chief Justice Lord Phillips and his Sentencing Guidelines Council - said removing the threat of jail from shoplifters was "a radical departure from present practice". It offered a second, less far-reaching, option which would see no shoplifter imprisoned for more than eight weeks. At present the average sentence for a shoplifter in magistrates courts is longer - and Crown Courts send down a typical shoplifter for more than seven months.

The proposals were sent out for consultation among pressure groups and quangos. The panel's final recommendations will, if past practice is followed, be rubberstamped by the Guidelines Council and passed on as instructions to the courts.

The no-jail rule has been proposed despite evidence provided to the panel that more than nine million shoplifting offences are carried out in England and Wales every year. Most are not reported to police. There were 280,461 recorded offences last year, the panel said, and of these fewer than a quarter ended with a sentence in court. Some 14,000 offences are punished with 'fixed penalty' fines similar to parking fines each year. Last year 13,135 shoplifters - around one in five of those found guilty - went to jail.

The panel interpreted Labour's 2003 Criminal Justice Act to mean that persistent offending does not bring tougher sentencing. It also said courts should take into advice from the Council-of Europe - parent body of the European Court of Human Rights - which says a sentence should be 'in proportion to the seriousness of the current offence'. It also suggested that as many as two-thirds of those arrested for shoplifting may be addicted to or using drugs, and many of these are stealing to pay for drug habits.

Since virtually all shoplifters who are jailed are sentenced on the basis of dismal criminal records, downgrading the importance of earlier convictions would have a dramatic impact. Richard Dodd of the British Retail Consortium said: "We are disgusted at the suggestion that shoplifters should not face the possibility of going to jail. It is like offering a licence to people to go into stores and take things without paying." Tory home affairs spokesman Edward Garnier said: "The law-abiding public expect that people stealing from shops should be properly punished, particularly if they are persistent offenders."

The Sentencing Advisory Panel is headed by academic lawyer Martin Wasik, a member of two pressure groups which campaign for fewer criminals to be jailed.

Report here




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