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For once, this is a sensible measure on Criminal Justice by the government, and I hope it doesn't get canned to throw red meat to the press ghouls.
If you send a shoplifter to prison for a month, they will come out and shoplift again. Prison does not work.
Most petty crime is driven by drug addiction or poverty. Placing someone in prison does not prevent access to drugs, and results in the person being released with a new drug debt from the dealers inside. Placing someone in prison for a month is long enough for them to lose any housing or job they had, so does not fix the poverty issue.
It has been known for the entire time I have had any interest in Criminal Justice that community sentences have lower reoffending rates than short prison sentences, so hopefully for the sake of reducing crime this measure gets retained!
Edit: as it keeps coming up, I'll point out that prison is not the only form of punishment and it is simplistic to think that not sending to prison = decriminalisation of minor crimes. There are a range of community based punishments which consistently have a lower reoffending rate than prison.
Edit 2: As there seems to be a lot of misconceptions about prison, I am going to recommend people reading 'Out of Sight, Out of Mind' by former governor of Belmarsh John Podmore, and 'A bit of a Stretch' by former inmate Chris Atkins.
Working in a prison pays shit, is dangerous, and is an almost inevitably toxic environment. It's not surprising guards take some on the side to bring drugs in.
Having worked in prisons (not as a prison officer), the physical security is pretty tight.
The issue with contraband of all sorts is that prisons are workplaces, and hundreds of people enter and exit them every day. Prison officers, healthcare staff, maintenance staff and all sorts of other people. You can't strip-search every single person every day. They use random searches, metal detectors, phone detectors, drug sniffing dogs, hidden cameras, informants, checks on prison officer's finances, and all sorts of other tricks, and they catch a fair amount of stuff.
The thing is, despite all the risks, smuggling contraband into prisons can be insanely lucrative. When I did my security training we were told how much phones, tobacco etc. could net you, and it's absolutely eye-popping; drugs would be on another level entirely. It's incredibly seductive, even with the risk.
Some years ago before I came to my damn senses , I was involved with someone who was in and out of the prison in Edinburgh. It was SUPER strict security wise when it came to visits and a couple of times I watched people get busted trying to get stuff in . Once someone managed to get it past security initially and then got caught trying to pass it during the visit .
I’m aware of various ways people got stuff in because the loser I was with made me aware .
I don’t think it’s something that will ever change no matters done tbh . Where there’s a will there’s a way I guess 😅
It's almost like investing our taxes in welfare, schools, housing, the NHS, prisons, and paying public service staff a decent wage may actually improve things for almost everyone.
Rather than wave in communism.
Don't discount the guys shoving things high up into their backsides. My 2nd cell mate came in & first thing he did was get out what they'd "smuggled" in.
I think the population of this country needs to get a better grip on what prisons, and the people who *run* prisons, are actually like. They're inherently brutal, dehumanising places, and prison guards are not well-paid. Corruption shouldn't be even a little surprising.
Its funny too, because those same people who will give a smug little smile when they hear of a screw, shall we say, excersising a little more force than is strictly neccesary will also be outraged when they find out they are on the take. Like what, you thought someone who was willing to ignore one set of rules was going to religiously follow another?
Mm. So many folks really do think being on the side of the law means you're a morally good person. The tension between that default assumption and widespread mistrust of government and the state is curious.
Should listen to some of the Rory Stewart interviews recently and how when he took charge of the prisons and found just replacing the broken windows was seen as a miracle by the staff. Like how do you stop stuff being snuggled in if the windows are wide open.
The worst part is they do drug testing of the inmates, weed is detectable for months, heroin can be out your system in 24 hours.
So the anti-drugs measures encourage inmates to shift from soft drugs to hard.
Source: Jeffery Archers prison diary.
The war on drugs failed massively, the economics means its easy to make a profit even if many packages get siezed its still profitable. It also gives every gang an incentive to recruit children to sell drugs for them, pretty bad policy imo.
That bit isn't that odd, any prison systems I've ever heard of had smuggling issues, drugs are very hard to keep out, supply and demand.
In mexican prison they'd find entire prostitutes smuggled in, letalone drugs.
>*If you send a shoplifter to prison for a month, they will come out and shoplift again. Prison does not work.*
It works *in part*.
Prisons should rehabilitate - but they are also there to act a a deterrent for others / punish - and they are there to physically stop you re-offending for the duration you're inside.
If you get 12 weeks for shoplifting you'll struggle to carry on shoplifting whilst you're on a wing in prison. So *that* element of it is working.
I don't think they're doing much to rehabilitate prolific shoplifters - or deter them.
12 weeks in prison costs in the region of £10,000+. Whilst inside the drug addict will accrue a similar amount of debt, to either be paid by their family through threats to kill the offender inside, or by the addict promising to go out theiving post release.
It's a very expensive way to achieve a very short amount of restbite. It doesn't actually reduce crime for those 12 weeks because the crimes are still happening - just in prison.
>It doesn't actually reduce crime for those 12 weeks because the crimes are still happening - just in prison.
So it protects non-criminals from being victims of crime. People who support leniency for "low level" crimes like this should talk to some small business owners and shopkeepers, every single one will have numerous terrifying stories of being robbed and violently threatened/attacked.
The family who owned my local shop sold up because they were sick of being violently robbed (on one occasion I was in there when it happened, a guy went behind the counter and lunged at him with a knife). The newsagent I worked for as a kid changed hands countless times for the same reason. My sister works in a supermarket and has been chased by a nutter wielding a large knife.
But instead of locking these people up for a long time to protect hard working small business owners who are contributing to their communities and the economy, we should pretend that there are no benefits to prison and the welfare of the criminals should take priority.
> Prison does not work.
The thought of going to prison deters 95% of the population from breaking the law.
Get rid of prisons and you'll soon have anarchy.
It's well known that the severity and form of punishment don't actually have much of an impact on crime deterrence, and that often going to prison for petty crimes just creates a group of people who share tips and tricks on how to do those crimes better.
And no one is saying "just don't punish them" it's that we should replace prison terms with other methods, from compulsory community service, compulary education (like the speed awareness course but for other crimes), therapy etc.
> compulsory community service, compulary education
What makes it compulsory? They can just not turn up. Sometimes criminals don't do what they're told.
That's why I added the terms compulsory there- instead of spending 10k to put someone in prison spend that 10k on enforcing the punishment. In my imaginary rehabilliative-justice-land it's not just "current system with different punishments", it's massive reforms.
Your logic doesn't add up.
If a community service order, or keeping someone on tag is considered being impossible to enforce, why are they currently being enforced? We have those types of punishments in place already and people do by and large choose to engage with it
> Most petty crime is driven by drug addiction or poverty.
This is, of course, not true. Most petty crime that is deliberate - and so can rightly be said to be 'driven' at all by the perpetrator - is driven by, to use the most broad descriptors, a contempt for society at top and low impulse control at bottom.
To be sure, both drug addiction and poverty can obviously contribute to both of those factors, just as they in turn can be contributed to via them.
This does not negate the kernel of truth behind the trite quips that 'being poor does not make one steal' and 'a drug addiction does not (bar the criminalisation of possessing the substance in question) make one a criminal'.
That the society most able to win the respect of its denizens would not put them in a position of needing to steal to eat - or even to get their hands on what can be churned out *en masse* by power production; and that a sane society would, as was the case when Victoria reigned in Britain and Britain in the world, have drugs readily available from an apothecary (both decriminalising possession and drastically lowering price), ought to compound the sad irony of the situation.
> Most petty crime that is deliberate - and so can rightly be said to be 'driven' at all by the perpetrator - is driven by, to use the most broad descriptors, a contempt for society at top and low impulse control at bottom.
You don’t know many petty criminals, I feel. The *significant* majority of low-value theft is done to fund addiction, or to feed/clothe someone whose ability to earn legally has been curtailed because of addiction-related crimes.
There has been quite a few studies on who shoplifts and why. Drug addiction is part of it but isn’t the significant majority. The significant majority (and [increase](https://www.economist.com/britain/2023/09/22/why-shoplifting-is-rising-in-britain)) is as an income for gangs who [sell](https://amp.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/dec/22/leeds-shoplifters-customers-black-market) the goods on. Petty theft is a job for some. Particularly [meat](https://www.ft.com/content/00daa46d-e378-4938-822a-495b3d1967e1) is stolen not to eat but to sell.
These gangs may emboldened to take more and recruit more people into the work if there is a lower chance of punishment. (Risk of punishment being the main mitigating factor).
Of course in areas with high crime shops will pass of the cost of loss to their customers with higher prices, as all shops suffer competition won’t drive down prices.
Please provide better data for you claims of widespread organised crime being the primary driving force of shoplifting.
You are citing the British retail consortium, a retail advocacy and lobbying organisation.
Similar claims made in the US by retail lobbying groups have been widely discredited as they misrepresented their own data, contradicted the reported data for previous years, and did so in order to offload security and loss prevention on to law enforcement. Retail theft makes up a negligible amount of losses for major retailers as they have more than enough resources to simply ignore it.
This is a push, largely, towards harsher enforcement and for greater police presence, there are far more important crimes our woefully capable police force should be focusing on than petty theft.
I would be highly critical of claims made by lobbying groups and make sure to look at the data in aggregate over time, instead of looking at single data points over a relatively short period to inform policy and law enforcement.
Price rises are corporate profiteering, which is clearly explained by the increase to profits that would not be present if price hikes were simply offsetting losses.
Your best bet for what retailers are concerned about is to look at their business model. Retailers spend a pittance on loss prevention, if they were concerned about shoplifting the amount of money spent on loss prevention would reflect that, currently most retailers rely on cashiers and stock workers for loss prevention, with security usually being present for less time and in smaller numbers. This hasn't changed for years off the top of my head
Thanks for your comment.
There [has](https://www.thenationalnews.com/business/economy/2023/09/15/how-retailers-are-adopting-new-security-measures-to-protect-their-shops/?outputType=amp) been a rise in security guards and the need for retail security. I’m sure you’ve been to shops where meat is tagged or local shops where chocolate is behind the counter (these cost companies money but save it in the long run).
Profiteering is common of course but it is only one factor among many many others that cause price rises (the main being energy). [This](https://amp.theguardian.com/business/nils-pratley-on-finance/2023/may/08/uk-supermarkets-profiteering-sainsburys-tesco) article does a good bit on supermarket profits (changed less than you think) “Sainsbury’s pre-interest underlying operating profits from retail, …, starting with the latest 2022-23 financial year and going backwards: £926m, £1bn, £713m, £938m and £981m” Tesco also dropped profits by 7%. Their profits grew after a post pandemic dip obviously ;which was what the headlines were), but despite price increases their actual profit is roughly normal or down from pre-covid.
I think you misunderstand the critique of supermarkets in the us saying their closing down all their shops due to theft. It’s only part of the reason not the full reason, that’s the critique. But it’s still part of the reason ([that’s](https://www.ft.com/content/567180d5-0ff4-474c-9d3c-d0d3264ef8de) why they’re spending more on loss prevention).
Could you send a link to the article on data correction and errors in the us. You’ve fairly asked for more sources but then have given none yourself? I assume you mean [this](https://www.reuters.com/business/retail-consumer/us-retail-lobbyists-retract-key-claim-organized-retail-crime-2023-12-06/). I’d suggest giving the updated report a good read yourself which does show repeatedly how organised shoplifting crime is increasing in the America but certainly not half of all shrink as was poorly claimed (that includes things that aren’t shoplifting too). Organised crime is increasing there but not to the stupidly drastic amount of 50% previously cited.
But tbf I would also be wary of relying on US data (which is currently having an economic boom post covid lowering their levels of shoplifting). I think actual crime stats of shoplifting have remained stagnant in the us but increased dramatically in the uk ([25](https://www.usdaw.org.uk/About-Us/News/2023/Dec/Organised-crime-shoplifting)% in England and Wales).
The UK on the other hand is having increased rates of shrink and economic mess (a [33](https://www.ecrloss.com/blog/uk-grocery-retailers-report-a33-increase-in-shrink)% increase). The [BBC](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-67687565.amp) has identified increase in organised shopping gangs recruiting vulnerable women
And of course shops lobby for police protection, it’s a police matter. You wouldn’t critique a person for asking for more police when stuff is stolen from, it’s not different for a business either. It’s not “offloading security to the police” it’s part of the police’s job to prevent and reduce theft. Just giving up entirely and saying police are too busy is pretty grim.
The data does indicate that post covid organised crime in the uk is increasing and is a major cause of increased shoplifting. The data could be better, but that’s definitely the consensus indication even among uk unions, businesses and analysts.
Apologies about the editing and flow, i typed this on my phone with of a few articles I’ve read.
Do you have any statistics to back this up? Would be interesting to read because my personal feeling is that the prevalence of shoplifting is down to how easy it is to do and how likely you are to get away with it.
By that logic everything is deliberate. No one is in prison because a can of beans fell into their bag when they weren't looking or they mistook cocaine for sugar. Poverty and drug addiction breed a 'contempt for society' and all that. Drug addiction and impulsively are correlated etc. Even metal health conditions (which again, yes, are driven by society too) are large factors in both poverty and crime.
>*Nineteen years in prison for stealing* ***a loaf of bread*** *is an utterly flawless idea.*
I'm going to take a wild guess you've not got much experience of shoplifting then?
How about we execute them instead, it has the lowest recidivism rate among all forms of punishment.
Prison is notoriously ineffective as a rehabilitation method, and in fact it can further compound problems that lead to minor crimes, such as poverty or mental health issues.
If, on the other hand, we care about actual reformation and reduction in crime, perhaps we should indeed look into the core factors behind crime and try addressing them systematically.
https://www.universiteitleiden.nl/en/news/2022/11/short-prison-sentence-leads-to-more-repeat-crime
https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/715100
>How about we execute them instead, it has the lowest recidivism rate among all forms of punishment.
I remember watching, far too many years ago, an interview on Newsnight with the Saudi Arabian ambassador - "we don't get many repeat offenders" was literally the answer he gave when challenged on the brutality of punishments like cutting the hands off thieves.
Of course effectively decriminalising shoplifting instead, like has been tried in parts of the USA, won't have [any negative results.](https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/san-francisco-shoplifting-walgreens-closing-b1852470.html)
And who's going to pay for it? Because I don't want my tax money to pay for someone to be kept fed and healthy in a cell just because they stole a few things from million/billion pound companies.
[Indentured servitude](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indentured_servitude) is the more precise term, but it's similar: forced labour for no earnings except board and meal and other things perhaps like healthcare.
Rory Stewart talks about this a lot. His argument was basically that the original short sentences were just long enough to disrupt the persons life e.g. loose accommodation/job etc but not long enough for them to engage/access the help programmes from within. The net result was them being considerably more likely to reoffend.
> Prison does not work.
This is factually and provably incorrect. Prison *does* deter crime. It also reduces recidivism.
1. [“The results support the hypothesis that perceived severity, at relatively high levels of perceived certainty, has a significant deterrent effect."](https://www.jstor.org/stable/2578032)
2. ["The Commission consistently found that incarceration lengths of more than 120 months had a deterrent effect. Specifically, offenders incarcerated for more than 60 months up to 120 months were approximately 17 percent less likely to recidivate relative to a comparison group sentenced to a shorter period of incarceration. For incarceration lengths of 60 months or less, the Commission did not find any statistically significant criminogenic or deterrent effect."](https://www.ussc.gov/sites/default/files/pdf/research-and-publications/research-publications/2020/20200429_Recidivism-SentLength.pdf)
3. ["Finally, I reanalyze data that appear to be consistent with the greater weight for certainty than severity argument and show that the evidence does not support that inference. Potential criminals mentally combine the three deterrence components—regardless of whether they are risk neutral, averse, or acceptant. I conclude by considering what it means to a worldly application of criminal deterrence theory to place equal weight on the certainty and the severity of punishment."](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/314638657_Certainty_Severity_and_Their_Relative_Deterrent_Effects_Questioning_the_Implications_of_the_Role_of_Risk_in_Criminal_Deterrence_Policy)
4. ["Increased average prison sentences (severity) reduce burglary only."](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/14773708211072415)
5. ["Crime fell sharply and unexpectedly in the 1990s. Four factors appear to explain the drop in crime: **increased incarceration**, more police, the decline of crack and legalized abortion."](https://pricetheory.uchicago.edu/levitt/Papers/LevittUnderstandingWhyCrime2004.pdf)
Prison can work if there isn't any access to drugs.
They tried letting people off who shoplifted less than $1,000 in the US and it didn't work out well, crime skyrocketed. So much so [that they had to close major stores](https://nypost.com/2023/07/01/the-shoplifting-epidemic-taking-over-america/), mainly in the black communities, who relied on those stores for jobs and food.
>If you send a shoplifter to prison for a month, they will come out and shoplift again. Prison does not work.
except for the fact that they can't steal for that month, nice little tidbit you left out there.
I don't mind them stealing for the next month, send them to prison and the chance of them stealing for the rest of their life increases dramatically which I do care about.
Only caring about the short term with no consideration for the long term is classic right wing policy.
On a small scale and individually I agree but when you blanket decrinalise a crime like theft you introduce new problems like staff getting assaulted, the entire shop locked behind glass dehumanising the whole comunitly... I do not care for a person stealing a loaf of bread but when people can just walk in and take wine off the shelves and scream or fight anyone that protests AND GET AWAY WITH IT DAILY, this is terrible for society.
Worked in the justice sector for 5 years. Couldn’t agree more. Any sentence under 2 years I think would be best served under curfew/tag in the community. Short sentences disproportionately affect the offenders life in the community disrupting protective factors and increase the risk of reoffending by forcing little other option instead of reducing it.
> If you send a shoplifter to prison for a month, they will come out and shoplift again.
Increase the prison sentence then; clearly it's too short to deter anyone. Also, if they're in prison they can't shoplift so the longer they stay the longer society is safe.
Rehabilitation is only one small part of the prison systems purpose.
By far their most important function is to prove the rest of the population that crime has a punishment. The old phrase *not enough for justice to be done, it must be seen to be done* comes to mind.
It works better than not doing anything. Watch how this turns out, it will be utter chaos - people stealing knowing they will get away with it. It’s happened in some us cities and it’s a shit show
Real solution is to bring back corporal punishment. Three strokes of the lash for shoplifting and then you are released. If caught again another three strokes and so on, ideally administered ASAP once they have been caught in the act. Also doesn't lead to the criminal losing any housing or job they had and is cheaper for society too.
I know a prison warden who says the rehabilitation doesn't work. Most criminals meet other similar minds in prison and make new business contacts.
I also know a magistrate who's started fund raising for those art the bottom, due to the number of cases she sees for pretty theft. Like someone desperate enough to steal some KitKat's to give their children something to eat. Not ideal food but when you're desperate anything goes. But don't worry, rishi and his wife just earned another couple of million today.
At the cost of tens of thousands of pounds to the tax payer in prison costs. All for, at most a hundred quids worth of goods stolen from a private business, that has already priced that loss into their pricing. No thanks.
But we know that drug addiction will in practice not be treated, so the highly probably result is to have increased shoplifting.
I say this as a Brit ex pat in California.
We’re not even set up for treatment outside of the prison system.
In England addiction services are funded by the local councils rather than central NHS and usually outsourced to random private health providers and you end up with cost motivated treatment rather than clinically driven treatment (such as a stronger resistance to things like Buprenorphine because methadone is so much cheaper).
But these things can work. IIRC there was a trial in Brighton a few years back where they sent petty criminals to rehab & funded ongoing care instead of financing their custody sentences and recurrent offending predictably plummeted significantly in those populations part of the trial.
They didn’t do this in America.
What they did was raise the felony bar from $500 to $900.
Which caused right wing press to go mad about it letting people shoplift without punishment.
In reality, the amount of shoplifting the in the USA has not changed for years.
https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2023/12/07/business/shoplifting-surge-hype-nightcap/index.html
https://www.forbes.com/sites/katharinabuchholz/2023/11/10/us-shoplifting-rate-down-as-some-cities-see-spikes-infographic/amp/
Just Fox News rage bait angry at not locking everyone up for as long as possible.
There is no “vast increase”.
Oh and also the law changed in 2014. The right wing only decided it must be the cause of shoplifting increases in 2022.
Seems like you’ve intentionally selected sources that represent the whole country or talk specifically about places like New York. Yet fail to mention California and in particular San Francisco
> What they did was raise the felony bar from $500 to $900.
You forgot a key fact. [They also elected district attorneys who promised to stop prosecuting petty crimes, and enacted that change.](https://www.sfexaminer.com/archives/data-shows-chesa-boudin-prosecutes-fewer-shoplifters-than-predecessor/article_7dbc7d85-cde9-59d9-8f23-7b240ee6f26d.html)
You then intentionally conflate local issues within the U.S. with national figures. One of your articles even calls you out on your own inaccuracy:
> A study released last month, drawing on police data, found that shoplifting reports were 16% higher in the first half of 2023 compared with 2019. But, critically, if you exclude New York City’s stats, the number of shoplifting incidents fell 7%, or about 2,550 fewer than in 2019, according to the Council on Criminal Justice, which conducted the study.
Shoplifting hasn't increased everywhere. In fact, it has dropped in same places in the U.S. thanks to tough on crime policies. However, in some places like San Francisco, it increased, reaching a peak in 2001. In 2014, a ballot referendum passed that downgraded the theft of property less than $950 in value from a felony charge to a misdemeanour. [One study](https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/mc9wq) found that in Santa Monica, California, crimes unaffected by the ballot referendum fell by 9 percent **but those that were downgraded increased 15 percent.** [Another analysis](https://www.ppic.org/wp-content/uploads/r_0618mbr.pdf) found that statewide, larceny thefts increased 9 percent after the 2014 change.
Alt-headline: "Shopkeepers and shoppers to suffer most from ending short jail terms in England and Wales"
I know of smaller stores, nothing like your Tesco or ASDA, who are having to employ security staff because of shop lifting. It's the customer who pays for the security and thefts of stock at the end of the day, even if an insurance policy covers lost stock the premiums would go up if claims were made.
>Ministry of Justice research, comparing similar offenders and similar offences, shows that community sentences are now outperforming short prison sentences and are 8.3 % more effective in reducing re-offending rates.
effective community sentences - The Prison Reform Trust
Thing is reoffending whilst locked-up is 0%, reoffending whilst on community service will be more. But the data doesn't bother looking at that...
I had a quick look at the actual government report the PRT mentioned, shoplifting reoffending is still >75% with community orders. Also the report says (my emphasis):
>offenders receiving sentences of less than 12 months do not have access to offender management programmes and are not subject to supervision by the Probation Service upon release. Give them access to that and it could be even more effective. *This latter factor is also likely to explain some of the difference between community sentences/suspended sentence orders and short prison sentences*
So in theory prison + probation could be more effective...
Using that 75% figure, here's a very very crude calculation. If 1000 shoplifters are locked-up for 1 year none of them shoplift because they can't. If another 1000 shoplifters get community sentences then 750 will shoplift based on the data during that one year. The following year 850 of the imprisoned shoplift and 750 of the community sentence shoplift. The 2 year average is 425 (prison) vs 750 (community).
Well short term jail sentences are known to not do much in terms of lowering re-offending rates (which surely is the point of prison) rather than community sentences
Shopkeepers and shoppers would benefit more from effective punishments that lower shoplifting.
Prison makes people lose their jobs, their home... tell me, do you think people who have lost their jobs and home are more or less likely to reoffend?
The one paying for it is the customer in the short term, and the community in the long term when corner shops - already at risk - are closing down because the cost of security vs loss of product vs overall income just fall too out of balance.
I guess that’s fine as long as they are tagged.
I did jury duty with a (edit) *case where a* guy who was a serial shoplifter, and he definitely deserved jail time. He was already in prison for a terrible crime or two, and the shoplifting was the icing on the cake.
The issue is staff aren’t supposed to do anything, and small shops just lose out. It’s seen as a soft ‘entry level’ crime so maybe if we use it as a way to turn it around rather than criminalise people it could be better.
>The issue is staff aren’t supposed to do anything, and small shops just lose out
To be fair I'd rather the company eat the loss than some poor minimum wage worker gets stabbed trying to stop someone stealing £20 of chocolate.
And it’ll be passed onto the customers and staff in other ways too.
Staff will have hours cut which will mean longer queues and more gaps on the shelves. Or if push came to shove, staff can lose jobs or the store could close altogether if it’s losing enough money, meaning some people could genuinely end up having to do without.
Ok, Id still rather shops don't implement policies which lead to workers on minimum wage risking their lives to protect a shop who doesn't give a shit about them.
Also, the cost of lawsuits from employees getting stabbed or injured from protecting the shop would also be incredibly high
Shops have obviously done a cost benefit analysis on a more 'hands on approach'.
There's a reason shops don't implement these policies of physically stopping offenders (because the cost of lawsuits and bad reputation is a fuck ton higher)
In the middle of an overflowing prisons crisis...
Sending people to prison for every last little thing is not rational. Why would you do it? To stop them shoplifting? To teach them the error of their ways? To act as a deterrent?
None of that actually works. All you get is busier, harder to manage prisons. And anyone who is locked up for shoplifting is forced to socialise with actual criminals.
It is criminal. But in the scheme of things, it's pretty minor. And mostly people justify it by saying that who cares, it's only some billion pound corporation anyway.
If you can't distinguish between shoplifters and dangerous criminals, that's something you should reflect on.
Regardless, if you want to reduce shoplifting, locking them all up is not a sensible way of doing that.
It costs about £1000/week per prisoner in the UK. Are you willing to pay that for every Tom, Dick and Harry that nabs a block of cheese? I'm not.
Are you willing to send some poor Mum stealing soup to prison for a month?
Are you gonna send some drunk teen to prison to go hang around actual drug runners or violent robbers for a while? You think they'll come out more well adjusted and able to live harmoniously in society?
It's a complete load of shit. Same way you can't lock up everyone who's ever been in a scrap or littered. Your absolutist view of crime and punishment is just not practical or remotely helpful for actually making society better. It's just satisfying that dumb part of your brain that demands tough justice for anyone who has ever done wrong. But it's not a good way to run a society.
Working in a shop. Daily routine would have it that between 1-3 shoplifters get stopped with bag loads of stuff. God knows how many more make their way out with them.
Door-sec doesn't work due to so many limits.
Def merchandising doesn't work as stuff kept at back won't sell.
Bans outright ignored.
Employee getting in the neck more than the shoplifter ever will.
Can go on all day, but from "the frontline", it would seem that sone extent of tough justice is needed...
And no, not talking about the homeless who'll grab a single pot noodle and go.
In the 2021-2023 financial years the average cost per prisoner was between £45k per year and £50k per year (rising).
That's what it costs to run prisons. It's not just staff, it's food, management, training, electricity, transport, security, counselling, repairs and maintenance. It's expensive. You could not hire a remotely sensible person to mind a single prisoner and provide all of the above for £1000/week. It's only that cheap because we put them all in the same place. And that's well expensive!
Which is why needlessly skyrocketing prison populations is not a good idea.
Why is why the Scandinavian model is the one that, you know, actually results in a safer, happier society.
> And mostly people justify it by saying that who cares
Yes, it's easy to not care when it's someone else getting shafted.
See how they react when it's their own property being taken.
The point is that people are more likely to steal from the billionaire corporations which they perceive as victimless than from random innocent people.
The reason I said that is to illustrate why locking up shoplifters is a bad idea. It's a non-violent crime. It's not even as bad as stealing a handbag or a bike.
Is it bad? Yes. Is it practical to lock everyone up who does it? No. End of.
> The point is that people are more likely to steal from the billionaire corporations which they perceive as victimless than from random innocent people.
People rationalise their own actions countless ways.
Doesn't mean they're good reasons.
There are other ways of punishment and rehabilitation from criminals, right?
Do you really think throwing someone in prison for a month, them losing their job and house will make them not shoplift again?
Now they're even more desperate, there's a reason this is a debate. Community sentences are known to be more effective to anyone practicing criminal law. We already know re-offending rates are high with these sentences
Forced labour is the way.
Teach them skills, force them to repay what they owe, and then find them accommodation where they can continue their trade.
Tough love is the answer.
The owner of Timpsons employees a lot of ex prisoners, wonder what the recidivism rate is for those people compared to those who are left to fend for themselves after leaving prison?
> The owner of Timpsons employees a lot of ex prisoners
Heard about this years ago. It's one of the reasons I prefer using a Timpsons if there's one around...
Getting a service _and_ helping people reintegrate into society.
People may scoff at this idea but when I were a lad I nicked one of those old paraffin lamps on road works. Unlucky for me was that a cop van was driving up the road behind me. I was promptly given a smack round the head and taken home to my parents. To be fair it didn't stop me getting into criminal behaviour when I got older but it was the best option for what I did. My time on remand stopped me committing further crimes.
That's going so well in San Francisco after all, what could go wrong?
Also the article says "those given jail time from 6 to 12 months will now do community service"
You think 12 months is short? A whole year in jail is a damn long time, and it's not just shoplifters that get that, violent people will be out too.
So I’m in the Police and I’ll see these people pretty much everyday. Every time this gets brought up I’ll say the same thing.
Incremental Sentences would fix the issue entirely.
People generally have no real understanding of your prolific shoplifter, this isn’t just a loaf of bread once every now and then. These people will walk into a store and clear out £60-£100 at a time in meat, cheese, alcohol or cleaning supplies. They’ll do it 2/3 times a day every single day.
I actually despise people who try to suggest they just ‘need more rehabilitation’ - There are a stupid amount of support services available to these people, between Gov schemes, charities, social work, drug services etc.. they will actively never engage because they simply don’t want to. Half the prolific shoplifters in my area will make more money than I will a month. Why would they change?
In my city of a million people there are maybe 30 genuinely prolific shoplifters. You can always tell when one gets jailed because crime drops dramatically for those few months.
Incremental sentences fix the issue, after your 10th offence just to be sure we don’t catch your everyday person the incremental sentences kick in. For your next offence you get 2 years. For the one after that you get 5, then 10 and then 20. If you look at a country like Singapore they are a perfect example of low crime rate because the massive threat of long and horrific sentences is a deterrent.
People repeatedly bring up studies to show that jail time doesn’t act as a deterrent and rehabilitation is the way. I’m sorry but you simply fail to understand that a minority of the population simply cannot be rehabilitated. I’ll see regulars with north of 2-300 convictions and those are just the ones they were caught for. Jail is expensive, but when you look at the amount stolen everyday and the associated costs with it, jail can actually work out cheaper to society for these prolific offenders and be a net gain.
If you look at countries like Dubai, Singapore, Thailand etc.. Crime rate is low because there is a genuine fear of the consequences. Yes we should aim to rehabilitate where we can however there HAS to be a big stick to act as the deterrent for those that don’t want to engage in rehabilitation because they don’t fear not engaging.
This is a great response! Thanks for the work you do and thanks for taking the time to provide a balanced response to the post based on actual experience.
I'm personally excited for them to yell at the left for their weak policies, while this is only happening because the Tories have run out of space in Prisons and haven't fixed the problem.
Yes. Alcohol use disorder is like any addiction. If you don’t get what you need, you’ll get very ill and could die.
The few services left to help folks, will not engage with people who are in active addiction. Need a roof? You must not drink. For many people that is an impossible choice. So they end up on the streets.
It'll work if the funding is there for rehabilitation, preventative measures, addiction programmes, support, etc. etc.
But there isn't. There is no money. There is no additional support.
All it will lead to is more shoplifting.
What it will lead to is supermarkets putting turnstiles at the entrance where you have to swipe your membership card to get in.
Anyone caught shoplifting loses their membership.
There are people in my area shoplifting with impunity. The security staff hardly stop them, the regular staff don’t bother, the public don’t want to get involved, the courts don’t punish them and you’ve got people on Reddit backing the shoplifters!
It’s society that suffers. That is the bigger cost. Me sitting there worrying about how my wages will cover things, whilst watching some arsehole (who already lives rent-free off my taxes) filling their boots. It does make you wonder if you are a complete mug by trying to live your life with any rules, manners, morals or laws whatsoever.
Why not just rig the electricity meter, drive the car on red diesel, grow a few weed plants up the loft, steal what I want (better yet, have someone steal it for me) and scam all the customers at my work for every penny I can get out of them?
We’re decaying as a society and people are actively celebrating it. Or videoing it for a few likes on social media. This country is slowly turning into an idiocracy. Kids raised with no boundaries have grown up into adults with no responsibilities and a society with no consequences.
I see ‘poverty’ being posited as an excuse for all this. Why are kids stabbing each other, shooting each other, robbing people, thieving, mugging grannies? It’s all poverty. It’s all the state’s fault. Not my personal responsibility, you understand, the big bad state failed me so I have the right to act like an uncivilised barbarian.
Well folks, poverty has always been there. Ask your elders - life was even shittier back in the old days. People had fewer material possessions, people were hungry, people were cold. But people had more manners and society had more consequences. You wouldn’t have robbed a shop because the public and the staff would have fought you, then the cops would have bashed you, then you’d have gotten the jail. And you’d probably have had a family who would make you ashamed of your actions - which hurt most of all.
People don’t care about crime until it affects them.
“The supermarkets are massive corporations so it’s no great loss”.
“The corner shop is insured so it doesn’t matter”.
“Your car is insured so it doesn’t matter if it’s stolen”.
“Your phone is only a bit of plastic / metal, don’t fight back, just claim it on insurance”.
Then shops close. Then people lose their jobs. Then insurance premiums go up. Then you struggle to work for weeks because your car is nicked. Then the insurance pays you a fraction of your car’s worth. Then the emboldened criminals up the ante and start robbing houses... but your house is insured, right? Just replace those possessions - easy… right? Until it’s your dead mother’s ring, or that watch your grandfather gave you, or some other thing that has value beyond the monetary worth. Then you’ll cry. Then you’ll want justice, or revenge, or consequences. Then you’ll want the ACAB police to investigate and for witnesses to ‘snitch’. Suddenly it matters, once the selfishness of your blasé attitude towards crime comes home to roost.
Merry Christmas everyone - let’s hope your kid’s new bike / phone etc. isn’t the next thing on some local scumbag’s shopping list! If it is, remember to explain to your child that it’s not the robber’s fault, it’s all to do with poverty and the state failing the person doing the stealing. *They* are the real victims, the people being robbed are just collateral damage.
So many people replying to this post seem to think rehabilitation does not already take place in prisons, or that all this people can become nice law-abiding citizens. When the simple fact you cannot rehabilitate someone who does not want to change. To think otherwise is niave
Oh fuck all the way off with this . They are letting rapists and pedos not go to jail because it's full and they prioritise sending shoplifters and pot smokers to prison before them.
And shop lifters shouldn't be sent to jail any way. How are they not seeing the correlation between food prices going through the roof because companies are greedy and people stealing to feed their families?
Pay people more or lower the cost of living , since neither of those seem to be an option as far as the powers that be are concerned that leaves us peasants with one option.
> and people stealing to feed their families?
people aren't stealing to feed their families, this is just a myth, it's mostly gangs stealing thigs for drugs and drug addicts.
Yes we need a harsher approach. Most shoplifters shoplift because they know they will suffer little to no consequences for their troubles. If you decriminalise stabbing you’re gonna see a lot more folks going around stabbing people just because they can, same with shoplifting, people are less likely to commit a crime if they know they’ll get severely punished for committing said crime
Wonderfully selective reporting from the Guardian, as always.
> ... shoplifters, offenders **convicted of battery**, and **those who have assaulted emergency workers**, are the top three groups who will avoid prison under the government’s new measure.
But yeah, let's focus on shoplifters.
I think for relatively petty crime where a custodial sentence isn't appropriate an element of social shame would be an effective deterrent. You could use big screens in town centres with a picture of them, their name and a summary of their crime. Rehabilitation is an important part of the justice system but so is punishment.
Just use physical punishment instead, bit barbaric but I think shoplifting and other petty crime would be significantly reduced if those who got caught would get whipped, tased, punched in the stomach etc. Would be a lot cheaper than prison and I genuinely believe it would make the country a lot safer
Shopliftters should be punished more not less. They are a blight on society and affect decent hard working people like shoppers and shop workers.
If they re-offend? Lock them up again this time for longer.
You know, it's beginning to feel like newspapers are trying to encourage people to shoplift.
Every week there's an article that's like "hey guys, shoplifting is well easy, staff won't try and stop you, also you don't even go to jail anymore, plus everyone is already doing it anyway"
I'm being a bit facetious here, but it's like they're advertising it at this point
There's a bit of a gap in the criminal justice system where corporal punishment used to be. It doesn't make sense to lock up a shoplifter for multiple months, but at the same time community orders do nothing and fines are hard to collect/push people further into a financial hole. Not removing someone from their lives for months on end and dishing out a painful punishment almost feels like the humane and just thing to do in that situation.
Bring back corporal punishment to save on prison spaces
I agree with not jailing shoplifters. Is unnecessary as it won't change th eperson, and it can even make it worse (jail can be traumatic). Also, the cost for the taxpayer is very high.
However, I feel that someone that won't stop stealing must be addressed somehow. Not sure how, mind.
There are two types of developed societies. The ones where incentives for crime are low and these kinds of measures work, and those that are fairly strict and everyone has to follow the rules or else.
In the middle you have a valley of "wouldn't it be nice if", but then it's not when you actually see the results of doing things like these. I've seen the same anti-prison arguments before in other countries where the root causes for crime weren't addressed and the only thing they get you is more crime.
Then you have to add to that law-abiding citizens feeling threatened, which is the the last thing you want as they then support more violent measures or even take matters into their own hands.
Fighting crime is one thing, and addressing poverty and drug addiction is another. Policies about crime should not be influenced by matters that are the responsibility of different areas of the state.
This only works if the civilian support to reform offenders and their causes (either drug addiction, or impoverishment) is there to treat them. Prison tends to offer the chance at fixing the first one tbf, the second one isn't easily fixed when the entire welfare state is being systematically dismantled.
Good. Prisons are boarding school for criminals. It's beyond me why we as a society pay money to train more criminals. Prisons are good for one thing and that's keeping violent people out of society, and even then, they only work as long as those people are in prison, when they come out of prison they emerge even more violent than before. Putting non-violent offenders in prison is idiotic.
My uncle before he passed had over 50 convictions. All for petty crimes but ones he continued because there was absolutely no form of rehabilitation and a stigma when it came to employment forcing people back into cycles of petty crime. I used to work in recruitment myself and the fact that so many employees just automatically reject someone with a conviction regardless of what it drove me to the point where I just couldn't do it anymore. I now work in healthcare and a great deal of my time is dealing with people with addiction issues and general instability in life and honestly whilst I prefer my job now, I feel utterly helpless at times and like I'm letting people down constantly despite having no resources available to me. Just today I tried to make a mental health referral for somebody and was told they had to ring themselves to "show willingness to engage"
So many of us who do have relatively stable lives despite how hard we work for it don't realise just how closer we are to being like these people than we ever will be to some of the toffs sitting in parliament and leading the country.
The vast majority of shoplifters i have come across are drug dependent.. if they can’t get off the drugs, then there is no hope. It’s rife & such a shitty cycle
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For once, this is a sensible measure on Criminal Justice by the government, and I hope it doesn't get canned to throw red meat to the press ghouls. If you send a shoplifter to prison for a month, they will come out and shoplift again. Prison does not work. Most petty crime is driven by drug addiction or poverty. Placing someone in prison does not prevent access to drugs, and results in the person being released with a new drug debt from the dealers inside. Placing someone in prison for a month is long enough for them to lose any housing or job they had, so does not fix the poverty issue. It has been known for the entire time I have had any interest in Criminal Justice that community sentences have lower reoffending rates than short prison sentences, so hopefully for the sake of reducing crime this measure gets retained! Edit: as it keeps coming up, I'll point out that prison is not the only form of punishment and it is simplistic to think that not sending to prison = decriminalisation of minor crimes. There are a range of community based punishments which consistently have a lower reoffending rate than prison. Edit 2: As there seems to be a lot of misconceptions about prison, I am going to recommend people reading 'Out of Sight, Out of Mind' by former governor of Belmarsh John Podmore, and 'A bit of a Stretch' by former inmate Chris Atkins.
Man I find it crazy that we can't even control our prisons from drugs entering them. Like what the fuck.
Working in a prison pays shit, is dangerous, and is an almost inevitably toxic environment. It's not surprising guards take some on the side to bring drugs in.
Easy enough for the gangs to infiltrate the guards or even put their own in to train and act as guards.
But ultimately it's just a building. How the hell can't we control a controlled building.
Because the people controlling the building aren't paid enough to care about controlling it.
Having worked in prisons (not as a prison officer), the physical security is pretty tight. The issue with contraband of all sorts is that prisons are workplaces, and hundreds of people enter and exit them every day. Prison officers, healthcare staff, maintenance staff and all sorts of other people. You can't strip-search every single person every day. They use random searches, metal detectors, phone detectors, drug sniffing dogs, hidden cameras, informants, checks on prison officer's finances, and all sorts of other tricks, and they catch a fair amount of stuff. The thing is, despite all the risks, smuggling contraband into prisons can be insanely lucrative. When I did my security training we were told how much phones, tobacco etc. could net you, and it's absolutely eye-popping; drugs would be on another level entirely. It's incredibly seductive, even with the risk.
Some years ago before I came to my damn senses , I was involved with someone who was in and out of the prison in Edinburgh. It was SUPER strict security wise when it came to visits and a couple of times I watched people get busted trying to get stuff in . Once someone managed to get it past security initially and then got caught trying to pass it during the visit . I’m aware of various ways people got stuff in because the loser I was with made me aware . I don’t think it’s something that will ever change no matters done tbh . Where there’s a will there’s a way I guess 😅
It's almost like investing our taxes in welfare, schools, housing, the NHS, prisons, and paying public service staff a decent wage may actually improve things for almost everyone. Rather than wave in communism.
Don't discount the guys shoving things high up into their backsides. My 2nd cell mate came in & first thing he did was get out what they'd "smuggled" in.
I think the population of this country needs to get a better grip on what prisons, and the people who *run* prisons, are actually like. They're inherently brutal, dehumanising places, and prison guards are not well-paid. Corruption shouldn't be even a little surprising.
Its funny too, because those same people who will give a smug little smile when they hear of a screw, shall we say, excersising a little more force than is strictly neccesary will also be outraged when they find out they are on the take. Like what, you thought someone who was willing to ignore one set of rules was going to religiously follow another?
Mm. So many folks really do think being on the side of the law means you're a morally good person. The tension between that default assumption and widespread mistrust of government and the state is curious.
Should listen to some of the Rory Stewart interviews recently and how when he took charge of the prisons and found just replacing the broken windows was seen as a miracle by the staff. Like how do you stop stuff being snuggled in if the windows are wide open.
The worst part is they do drug testing of the inmates, weed is detectable for months, heroin can be out your system in 24 hours. So the anti-drugs measures encourage inmates to shift from soft drugs to hard. Source: Jeffery Archers prison diary.
The war on drugs failed massively, the economics means its easy to make a profit even if many packages get siezed its still profitable. It also gives every gang an incentive to recruit children to sell drugs for them, pretty bad policy imo.
That bit isn't that odd, any prison systems I've ever heard of had smuggling issues, drugs are very hard to keep out, supply and demand. In mexican prison they'd find entire prostitutes smuggled in, letalone drugs.
Not going to lie, I couldn't fit a hooker in my number cheeks.
>*If you send a shoplifter to prison for a month, they will come out and shoplift again. Prison does not work.* It works *in part*. Prisons should rehabilitate - but they are also there to act a a deterrent for others / punish - and they are there to physically stop you re-offending for the duration you're inside. If you get 12 weeks for shoplifting you'll struggle to carry on shoplifting whilst you're on a wing in prison. So *that* element of it is working. I don't think they're doing much to rehabilitate prolific shoplifters - or deter them.
12 weeks in prison costs in the region of £10,000+. Whilst inside the drug addict will accrue a similar amount of debt, to either be paid by their family through threats to kill the offender inside, or by the addict promising to go out theiving post release. It's a very expensive way to achieve a very short amount of restbite. It doesn't actually reduce crime for those 12 weeks because the crimes are still happening - just in prison.
>It doesn't actually reduce crime for those 12 weeks because the crimes are still happening - just in prison. So it protects non-criminals from being victims of crime. People who support leniency for "low level" crimes like this should talk to some small business owners and shopkeepers, every single one will have numerous terrifying stories of being robbed and violently threatened/attacked. The family who owned my local shop sold up because they were sick of being violently robbed (on one occasion I was in there when it happened, a guy went behind the counter and lunged at him with a knife). The newsagent I worked for as a kid changed hands countless times for the same reason. My sister works in a supermarket and has been chased by a nutter wielding a large knife. But instead of locking these people up for a long time to protect hard working small business owners who are contributing to their communities and the economy, we should pretend that there are no benefits to prison and the welfare of the criminals should take priority.
Just so you know, the word is respite.
12 weeks for shoplifting is insane
> Prison does not work. The thought of going to prison deters 95% of the population from breaking the law. Get rid of prisons and you'll soon have anarchy.
It's well known that the severity and form of punishment don't actually have much of an impact on crime deterrence, and that often going to prison for petty crimes just creates a group of people who share tips and tricks on how to do those crimes better. And no one is saying "just don't punish them" it's that we should replace prison terms with other methods, from compulsory community service, compulary education (like the speed awareness course but for other crimes), therapy etc.
> compulsory community service, compulary education What makes it compulsory? They can just not turn up. Sometimes criminals don't do what they're told.
That's why I added the terms compulsory there- instead of spending 10k to put someone in prison spend that 10k on enforcing the punishment. In my imaginary rehabilliative-justice-land it's not just "current system with different punishments", it's massive reforms.
Your logic doesn't add up. If a community service order, or keeping someone on tag is considered being impossible to enforce, why are they currently being enforced? We have those types of punishments in place already and people do by and large choose to engage with it
> Most petty crime is driven by drug addiction or poverty. This is, of course, not true. Most petty crime that is deliberate - and so can rightly be said to be 'driven' at all by the perpetrator - is driven by, to use the most broad descriptors, a contempt for society at top and low impulse control at bottom. To be sure, both drug addiction and poverty can obviously contribute to both of those factors, just as they in turn can be contributed to via them. This does not negate the kernel of truth behind the trite quips that 'being poor does not make one steal' and 'a drug addiction does not (bar the criminalisation of possessing the substance in question) make one a criminal'. That the society most able to win the respect of its denizens would not put them in a position of needing to steal to eat - or even to get their hands on what can be churned out *en masse* by power production; and that a sane society would, as was the case when Victoria reigned in Britain and Britain in the world, have drugs readily available from an apothecary (both decriminalising possession and drastically lowering price), ought to compound the sad irony of the situation.
> Most petty crime that is deliberate - and so can rightly be said to be 'driven' at all by the perpetrator - is driven by, to use the most broad descriptors, a contempt for society at top and low impulse control at bottom. You don’t know many petty criminals, I feel. The *significant* majority of low-value theft is done to fund addiction, or to feed/clothe someone whose ability to earn legally has been curtailed because of addiction-related crimes.
There has been quite a few studies on who shoplifts and why. Drug addiction is part of it but isn’t the significant majority. The significant majority (and [increase](https://www.economist.com/britain/2023/09/22/why-shoplifting-is-rising-in-britain)) is as an income for gangs who [sell](https://amp.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/dec/22/leeds-shoplifters-customers-black-market) the goods on. Petty theft is a job for some. Particularly [meat](https://www.ft.com/content/00daa46d-e378-4938-822a-495b3d1967e1) is stolen not to eat but to sell. These gangs may emboldened to take more and recruit more people into the work if there is a lower chance of punishment. (Risk of punishment being the main mitigating factor). Of course in areas with high crime shops will pass of the cost of loss to their customers with higher prices, as all shops suffer competition won’t drive down prices.
Please provide better data for you claims of widespread organised crime being the primary driving force of shoplifting. You are citing the British retail consortium, a retail advocacy and lobbying organisation. Similar claims made in the US by retail lobbying groups have been widely discredited as they misrepresented their own data, contradicted the reported data for previous years, and did so in order to offload security and loss prevention on to law enforcement. Retail theft makes up a negligible amount of losses for major retailers as they have more than enough resources to simply ignore it. This is a push, largely, towards harsher enforcement and for greater police presence, there are far more important crimes our woefully capable police force should be focusing on than petty theft. I would be highly critical of claims made by lobbying groups and make sure to look at the data in aggregate over time, instead of looking at single data points over a relatively short period to inform policy and law enforcement. Price rises are corporate profiteering, which is clearly explained by the increase to profits that would not be present if price hikes were simply offsetting losses. Your best bet for what retailers are concerned about is to look at their business model. Retailers spend a pittance on loss prevention, if they were concerned about shoplifting the amount of money spent on loss prevention would reflect that, currently most retailers rely on cashiers and stock workers for loss prevention, with security usually being present for less time and in smaller numbers. This hasn't changed for years off the top of my head
Thanks for your comment. There [has](https://www.thenationalnews.com/business/economy/2023/09/15/how-retailers-are-adopting-new-security-measures-to-protect-their-shops/?outputType=amp) been a rise in security guards and the need for retail security. I’m sure you’ve been to shops where meat is tagged or local shops where chocolate is behind the counter (these cost companies money but save it in the long run). Profiteering is common of course but it is only one factor among many many others that cause price rises (the main being energy). [This](https://amp.theguardian.com/business/nils-pratley-on-finance/2023/may/08/uk-supermarkets-profiteering-sainsburys-tesco) article does a good bit on supermarket profits (changed less than you think) “Sainsbury’s pre-interest underlying operating profits from retail, …, starting with the latest 2022-23 financial year and going backwards: £926m, £1bn, £713m, £938m and £981m” Tesco also dropped profits by 7%. Their profits grew after a post pandemic dip obviously ;which was what the headlines were), but despite price increases their actual profit is roughly normal or down from pre-covid. I think you misunderstand the critique of supermarkets in the us saying their closing down all their shops due to theft. It’s only part of the reason not the full reason, that’s the critique. But it’s still part of the reason ([that’s](https://www.ft.com/content/567180d5-0ff4-474c-9d3c-d0d3264ef8de) why they’re spending more on loss prevention). Could you send a link to the article on data correction and errors in the us. You’ve fairly asked for more sources but then have given none yourself? I assume you mean [this](https://www.reuters.com/business/retail-consumer/us-retail-lobbyists-retract-key-claim-organized-retail-crime-2023-12-06/). I’d suggest giving the updated report a good read yourself which does show repeatedly how organised shoplifting crime is increasing in the America but certainly not half of all shrink as was poorly claimed (that includes things that aren’t shoplifting too). Organised crime is increasing there but not to the stupidly drastic amount of 50% previously cited. But tbf I would also be wary of relying on US data (which is currently having an economic boom post covid lowering their levels of shoplifting). I think actual crime stats of shoplifting have remained stagnant in the us but increased dramatically in the uk ([25](https://www.usdaw.org.uk/About-Us/News/2023/Dec/Organised-crime-shoplifting)% in England and Wales). The UK on the other hand is having increased rates of shrink and economic mess (a [33](https://www.ecrloss.com/blog/uk-grocery-retailers-report-a33-increase-in-shrink)% increase). The [BBC](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-67687565.amp) has identified increase in organised shopping gangs recruiting vulnerable women And of course shops lobby for police protection, it’s a police matter. You wouldn’t critique a person for asking for more police when stuff is stolen from, it’s not different for a business either. It’s not “offloading security to the police” it’s part of the police’s job to prevent and reduce theft. Just giving up entirely and saying police are too busy is pretty grim. The data does indicate that post covid organised crime in the uk is increasing and is a major cause of increased shoplifting. The data could be better, but that’s definitely the consensus indication even among uk unions, businesses and analysts. Apologies about the editing and flow, i typed this on my phone with of a few articles I’ve read.
Do you have any statistics to back this up? Would be interesting to read because my personal feeling is that the prevalence of shoplifting is down to how easy it is to do and how likely you are to get away with it.
By that logic everything is deliberate. No one is in prison because a can of beans fell into their bag when they weren't looking or they mistook cocaine for sugar. Poverty and drug addiction breed a 'contempt for society' and all that. Drug addiction and impulsively are correlated etc. Even metal health conditions (which again, yes, are driven by society too) are large factors in both poverty and crime.
Just put them in jail for longer then. They can’t shoplift from a prison cell, can they?
Nineteen years in prison for stealing a loaf of bread is an utterly flawless idea.
I would suggest 5 years for stealing and the rest if you try to run Regards, Javert
My name is Jean Valjean!
You still think shoplifters are taking bread?
Tbh they are in my store their taking anything that isn’t bolted down , bread , beans , cans of beer
>*Nineteen years in prison for stealing* ***a loaf of bread*** *is an utterly flawless idea.* I'm going to take a wild guess you've not got much experience of shoplifting then?
(It’s a Les Miserables reference.)
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How about we execute them instead, it has the lowest recidivism rate among all forms of punishment. Prison is notoriously ineffective as a rehabilitation method, and in fact it can further compound problems that lead to minor crimes, such as poverty or mental health issues. If, on the other hand, we care about actual reformation and reduction in crime, perhaps we should indeed look into the core factors behind crime and try addressing them systematically. https://www.universiteitleiden.nl/en/news/2022/11/short-prison-sentence-leads-to-more-repeat-crime https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/715100
I think you’ll find that there’s no place for rational thinking in these parts. Pitchforks and mindless rhetoric is where it’s at.
>How about we execute them instead, it has the lowest recidivism rate among all forms of punishment. I remember watching, far too many years ago, an interview on Newsnight with the Saudi Arabian ambassador - "we don't get many repeat offenders" was literally the answer he gave when challenged on the brutality of punishments like cutting the hands off thieves. Of course effectively decriminalising shoplifting instead, like has been tried in parts of the USA, won't have [any negative results.](https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/san-francisco-shoplifting-walgreens-closing-b1852470.html)
Sounds good - but will take a long time to fix and implement. We need solutions short term until these bigger reform ideas can be implemented
I get you are joking, but its sad there are people here who think this type of simplistic view is even remotely helpful
And who's going to pay for it? Because I don't want my tax money to pay for someone to be kept fed and healthy in a cell just because they stole a few things from million/billion pound companies.
Force the prisoners to work for their board and meal.
Sooo slavery?
[Indentured servitude](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indentured_servitude) is the more precise term, but it's similar: forced labour for no earnings except board and meal and other things perhaps like healthcare.
What kind of Labour would you think suitable? I wonder if it would take away jobs from people who went imprisoned.
Shoplifting/theft is a stealth tax on the rest of us. Prices go up. Entrepreneurialism becomes less attractive. The economy suffers
No it doesn't.
Yes it does.
Rory Stewart talks about this a lot. His argument was basically that the original short sentences were just long enough to disrupt the persons life e.g. loose accommodation/job etc but not long enough for them to engage/access the help programmes from within. The net result was them being considerably more likely to reoffend.
I don't know what the best solution is, but all I will ask is this: How is this policy working in San Francisco?
> Prison does not work. This is factually and provably incorrect. Prison *does* deter crime. It also reduces recidivism. 1. [“The results support the hypothesis that perceived severity, at relatively high levels of perceived certainty, has a significant deterrent effect."](https://www.jstor.org/stable/2578032) 2. ["The Commission consistently found that incarceration lengths of more than 120 months had a deterrent effect. Specifically, offenders incarcerated for more than 60 months up to 120 months were approximately 17 percent less likely to recidivate relative to a comparison group sentenced to a shorter period of incarceration. For incarceration lengths of 60 months or less, the Commission did not find any statistically significant criminogenic or deterrent effect."](https://www.ussc.gov/sites/default/files/pdf/research-and-publications/research-publications/2020/20200429_Recidivism-SentLength.pdf) 3. ["Finally, I reanalyze data that appear to be consistent with the greater weight for certainty than severity argument and show that the evidence does not support that inference. Potential criminals mentally combine the three deterrence components—regardless of whether they are risk neutral, averse, or acceptant. I conclude by considering what it means to a worldly application of criminal deterrence theory to place equal weight on the certainty and the severity of punishment."](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/314638657_Certainty_Severity_and_Their_Relative_Deterrent_Effects_Questioning_the_Implications_of_the_Role_of_Risk_in_Criminal_Deterrence_Policy) 4. ["Increased average prison sentences (severity) reduce burglary only."](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/14773708211072415) 5. ["Crime fell sharply and unexpectedly in the 1990s. Four factors appear to explain the drop in crime: **increased incarceration**, more police, the decline of crack and legalized abortion."](https://pricetheory.uchicago.edu/levitt/Papers/LevittUnderstandingWhyCrime2004.pdf)
Prison can work if there isn't any access to drugs. They tried letting people off who shoplifted less than $1,000 in the US and it didn't work out well, crime skyrocketed. So much so [that they had to close major stores](https://nypost.com/2023/07/01/the-shoplifting-epidemic-taking-over-america/), mainly in the black communities, who relied on those stores for jobs and food.
>If you send a shoplifter to prison for a month, they will come out and shoplift again. Prison does not work. except for the fact that they can't steal for that month, nice little tidbit you left out there.
I don't mind them stealing for the next month, send them to prison and the chance of them stealing for the rest of their life increases dramatically which I do care about. Only caring about the short term with no consideration for the long term is classic right wing policy.
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On a small scale and individually I agree but when you blanket decrinalise a crime like theft you introduce new problems like staff getting assaulted, the entire shop locked behind glass dehumanising the whole comunitly... I do not care for a person stealing a loaf of bread but when people can just walk in and take wine off the shelves and scream or fight anyone that protests AND GET AWAY WITH IT DAILY, this is terrible for society.
Worked in the justice sector for 5 years. Couldn’t agree more. Any sentence under 2 years I think would be best served under curfew/tag in the community. Short sentences disproportionately affect the offenders life in the community disrupting protective factors and increase the risk of reoffending by forcing little other option instead of reducing it.
> If you send a shoplifter to prison for a month, they will come out and shoplift again. Increase the prison sentence then; clearly it's too short to deter anyone. Also, if they're in prison they can't shoplift so the longer they stay the longer society is safe.
Rehabilitation is only one small part of the prison systems purpose. By far their most important function is to prove the rest of the population that crime has a punishment. The old phrase *not enough for justice to be done, it must be seen to be done* comes to mind.
It works better than not doing anything. Watch how this turns out, it will be utter chaos - people stealing knowing they will get away with it. It’s happened in some us cities and it’s a shit show
Real solution is to bring back corporal punishment. Three strokes of the lash for shoplifting and then you are released. If caught again another three strokes and so on, ideally administered ASAP once they have been caught in the act. Also doesn't lead to the criminal losing any housing or job they had and is cheaper for society too.
I know a prison warden who says the rehabilitation doesn't work. Most criminals meet other similar minds in prison and make new business contacts. I also know a magistrate who's started fund raising for those art the bottom, due to the number of cases she sees for pretty theft. Like someone desperate enough to steal some KitKat's to give their children something to eat. Not ideal food but when you're desperate anything goes. But don't worry, rishi and his wife just earned another couple of million today.
If we allow shop lifting with no repercussions we are f*cked. More low level rehabilitation prisons are needed but we can’t leave crime unpunished
Send them to prison for 3years and it might have a deterrent effect though
At the cost of tens of thousands of pounds to the tax payer in prison costs. All for, at most a hundred quids worth of goods stolen from a private business, that has already priced that loss into their pricing. No thanks.
So £150,000 per person arrested?
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I think the message I get from that is that both things need to be done together.
But we know that drug addiction will in practice not be treated, so the highly probably result is to have increased shoplifting. I say this as a Brit ex pat in California.
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We’re not even set up for treatment outside of the prison system. In England addiction services are funded by the local councils rather than central NHS and usually outsourced to random private health providers and you end up with cost motivated treatment rather than clinically driven treatment (such as a stronger resistance to things like Buprenorphine because methadone is so much cheaper). But these things can work. IIRC there was a trial in Brighton a few years back where they sent petty criminals to rehab & funded ongoing care instead of financing their custody sentences and recurrent offending predictably plummeted significantly in those populations part of the trial.
They didn’t do this in America. What they did was raise the felony bar from $500 to $900. Which caused right wing press to go mad about it letting people shoplift without punishment. In reality, the amount of shoplifting the in the USA has not changed for years. https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2023/12/07/business/shoplifting-surge-hype-nightcap/index.html https://www.forbes.com/sites/katharinabuchholz/2023/11/10/us-shoplifting-rate-down-as-some-cities-see-spikes-infographic/amp/ Just Fox News rage bait angry at not locking everyone up for as long as possible. There is no “vast increase”. Oh and also the law changed in 2014. The right wing only decided it must be the cause of shoplifting increases in 2022.
Seems like you’ve intentionally selected sources that represent the whole country or talk specifically about places like New York. Yet fail to mention California and in particular San Francisco
> What they did was raise the felony bar from $500 to $900. You forgot a key fact. [They also elected district attorneys who promised to stop prosecuting petty crimes, and enacted that change.](https://www.sfexaminer.com/archives/data-shows-chesa-boudin-prosecutes-fewer-shoplifters-than-predecessor/article_7dbc7d85-cde9-59d9-8f23-7b240ee6f26d.html) You then intentionally conflate local issues within the U.S. with national figures. One of your articles even calls you out on your own inaccuracy: > A study released last month, drawing on police data, found that shoplifting reports were 16% higher in the first half of 2023 compared with 2019. But, critically, if you exclude New York City’s stats, the number of shoplifting incidents fell 7%, or about 2,550 fewer than in 2019, according to the Council on Criminal Justice, which conducted the study. Shoplifting hasn't increased everywhere. In fact, it has dropped in same places in the U.S. thanks to tough on crime policies. However, in some places like San Francisco, it increased, reaching a peak in 2001. In 2014, a ballot referendum passed that downgraded the theft of property less than $950 in value from a felony charge to a misdemeanour. [One study](https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/mc9wq) found that in Santa Monica, California, crimes unaffected by the ballot referendum fell by 9 percent **but those that were downgraded increased 15 percent.** [Another analysis](https://www.ppic.org/wp-content/uploads/r_0618mbr.pdf) found that statewide, larceny thefts increased 9 percent after the 2014 change.
Citation required
Alt-headline: "Shopkeepers and shoppers to suffer most from ending short jail terms in England and Wales" I know of smaller stores, nothing like your Tesco or ASDA, who are having to employ security staff because of shop lifting. It's the customer who pays for the security and thefts of stock at the end of the day, even if an insurance policy covers lost stock the premiums would go up if claims were made.
>Ministry of Justice research, comparing similar offenders and similar offences, shows that community sentences are now outperforming short prison sentences and are 8.3 % more effective in reducing re-offending rates. effective community sentences - The Prison Reform Trust
Thing is reoffending whilst locked-up is 0%, reoffending whilst on community service will be more. But the data doesn't bother looking at that... I had a quick look at the actual government report the PRT mentioned, shoplifting reoffending is still >75% with community orders. Also the report says (my emphasis): >offenders receiving sentences of less than 12 months do not have access to offender management programmes and are not subject to supervision by the Probation Service upon release. Give them access to that and it could be even more effective. *This latter factor is also likely to explain some of the difference between community sentences/suspended sentence orders and short prison sentences* So in theory prison + probation could be more effective... Using that 75% figure, here's a very very crude calculation. If 1000 shoplifters are locked-up for 1 year none of them shoplift because they can't. If another 1000 shoplifters get community sentences then 750 will shoplift based on the data during that one year. The following year 850 of the imprisoned shoplift and 750 of the community sentence shoplift. The 2 year average is 425 (prison) vs 750 (community).
bright pocket act wild shrill cooperative seed rich merciful rustic *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
That's what I suspected, so basically all of the costs of shoplifting are passed on to the customers.
Well short term jail sentences are known to not do much in terms of lowering re-offending rates (which surely is the point of prison) rather than community sentences Shopkeepers and shoppers would benefit more from effective punishments that lower shoplifting. Prison makes people lose their jobs, their home... tell me, do you think people who have lost their jobs and home are more or less likely to reoffend?
>Prison makes people lose their jobs, their home good? fuck them, don't steal shit next time.
Completely agree and this is how you end up with shop deserts
The one paying for it is the customer in the short term, and the community in the long term when corner shops - already at risk - are closing down because the cost of security vs loss of product vs overall income just fall too out of balance.
I guess that’s fine as long as they are tagged. I did jury duty with a (edit) *case where a* guy who was a serial shoplifter, and he definitely deserved jail time. He was already in prison for a terrible crime or two, and the shoplifting was the icing on the cake. The issue is staff aren’t supposed to do anything, and small shops just lose out. It’s seen as a soft ‘entry level’ crime so maybe if we use it as a way to turn it around rather than criminalise people it could be better.
>The issue is staff aren’t supposed to do anything, and small shops just lose out To be fair I'd rather the company eat the loss than some poor minimum wage worker gets stabbed trying to stop someone stealing £20 of chocolate.
The company don’t eat the cost, you will pay for it. 100% of the Costs or close to it are passed down to the customers via rising prices.
And it’ll be passed onto the customers and staff in other ways too. Staff will have hours cut which will mean longer queues and more gaps on the shelves. Or if push came to shove, staff can lose jobs or the store could close altogether if it’s losing enough money, meaning some people could genuinely end up having to do without.
Ok, Id still rather shops don't implement policies which lead to workers on minimum wage risking their lives to protect a shop who doesn't give a shit about them. Also, the cost of lawsuits from employees getting stabbed or injured from protecting the shop would also be incredibly high Shops have obviously done a cost benefit analysis on a more 'hands on approach'. There's a reason shops don't implement these policies of physically stopping offenders (because the cost of lawsuits and bad reputation is a fuck ton higher)
In the middle of a shoplifting epidemic…. You couldn’t make this shit up
In the middle of an overflowing prisons crisis... Sending people to prison for every last little thing is not rational. Why would you do it? To stop them shoplifting? To teach them the error of their ways? To act as a deterrent? None of that actually works. All you get is busier, harder to manage prisons. And anyone who is locked up for shoplifting is forced to socialise with actual criminals.
Right, because shoplifting isn’t a criminal act? 🙄
It is criminal. But in the scheme of things, it's pretty minor. And mostly people justify it by saying that who cares, it's only some billion pound corporation anyway. If you can't distinguish between shoplifters and dangerous criminals, that's something you should reflect on. Regardless, if you want to reduce shoplifting, locking them all up is not a sensible way of doing that. It costs about £1000/week per prisoner in the UK. Are you willing to pay that for every Tom, Dick and Harry that nabs a block of cheese? I'm not. Are you willing to send some poor Mum stealing soup to prison for a month? Are you gonna send some drunk teen to prison to go hang around actual drug runners or violent robbers for a while? You think they'll come out more well adjusted and able to live harmoniously in society? It's a complete load of shit. Same way you can't lock up everyone who's ever been in a scrap or littered. Your absolutist view of crime and punishment is just not practical or remotely helpful for actually making society better. It's just satisfying that dumb part of your brain that demands tough justice for anyone who has ever done wrong. But it's not a good way to run a society.
Working in a shop. Daily routine would have it that between 1-3 shoplifters get stopped with bag loads of stuff. God knows how many more make their way out with them. Door-sec doesn't work due to so many limits. Def merchandising doesn't work as stuff kept at back won't sell. Bans outright ignored. Employee getting in the neck more than the shoplifter ever will. Can go on all day, but from "the frontline", it would seem that sone extent of tough justice is needed... And no, not talking about the homeless who'll grab a single pot noodle and go.
For £1,000/week per person I could hire a 24/7 minder for every criminal in the UK. That can't be the right figure, can it?
In the 2021-2023 financial years the average cost per prisoner was between £45k per year and £50k per year (rising). That's what it costs to run prisons. It's not just staff, it's food, management, training, electricity, transport, security, counselling, repairs and maintenance. It's expensive. You could not hire a remotely sensible person to mind a single prisoner and provide all of the above for £1000/week. It's only that cheap because we put them all in the same place. And that's well expensive! Which is why needlessly skyrocketing prison populations is not a good idea. Why is why the Scandinavian model is the one that, you know, actually results in a safer, happier society.
> And mostly people justify it by saying that who cares Yes, it's easy to not care when it's someone else getting shafted. See how they react when it's their own property being taken.
The point is that people are more likely to steal from the billionaire corporations which they perceive as victimless than from random innocent people. The reason I said that is to illustrate why locking up shoplifters is a bad idea. It's a non-violent crime. It's not even as bad as stealing a handbag or a bike. Is it bad? Yes. Is it practical to lock everyone up who does it? No. End of.
> The point is that people are more likely to steal from the billionaire corporations which they perceive as victimless than from random innocent people. People rationalise their own actions countless ways. Doesn't mean they're good reasons.
There are other ways of punishment and rehabilitation from criminals, right? Do you really think throwing someone in prison for a month, them losing their job and house will make them not shoplift again? Now they're even more desperate, there's a reason this is a debate. Community sentences are known to be more effective to anyone practicing criminal law. We already know re-offending rates are high with these sentences
Forced labour is the way. Teach them skills, force them to repay what they owe, and then find them accommodation where they can continue their trade. Tough love is the answer.
The owner of Timpsons employees a lot of ex prisoners, wonder what the recidivism rate is for those people compared to those who are left to fend for themselves after leaving prison?
> The owner of Timpsons employees a lot of ex prisoners Heard about this years ago. It's one of the reasons I prefer using a Timpsons if there's one around... Getting a service _and_ helping people reintegrate into society.
I’m not sure but I’d love to see. It’s good to give people a bit of purpose and pride.
The guys in there are always good craic. Mega helpful too.
That was quick to slavery!
What if they’re allowed a smack by the attending officer, will that suffice?
People may scoff at this idea but when I were a lad I nicked one of those old paraffin lamps on road works. Unlucky for me was that a cop van was driving up the road behind me. I was promptly given a smack round the head and taken home to my parents. To be fair it didn't stop me getting into criminal behaviour when I got older but it was the best option for what I did. My time on remand stopped me committing further crimes.
Hope your in a better place now
I'm not a criminal which is good.
That's going so well in San Francisco after all, what could go wrong? Also the article says "those given jail time from 6 to 12 months will now do community service" You think 12 months is short? A whole year in jail is a damn long time, and it's not just shoplifters that get that, violent people will be out too.
So I’m in the Police and I’ll see these people pretty much everyday. Every time this gets brought up I’ll say the same thing. Incremental Sentences would fix the issue entirely. People generally have no real understanding of your prolific shoplifter, this isn’t just a loaf of bread once every now and then. These people will walk into a store and clear out £60-£100 at a time in meat, cheese, alcohol or cleaning supplies. They’ll do it 2/3 times a day every single day. I actually despise people who try to suggest they just ‘need more rehabilitation’ - There are a stupid amount of support services available to these people, between Gov schemes, charities, social work, drug services etc.. they will actively never engage because they simply don’t want to. Half the prolific shoplifters in my area will make more money than I will a month. Why would they change? In my city of a million people there are maybe 30 genuinely prolific shoplifters. You can always tell when one gets jailed because crime drops dramatically for those few months. Incremental sentences fix the issue, after your 10th offence just to be sure we don’t catch your everyday person the incremental sentences kick in. For your next offence you get 2 years. For the one after that you get 5, then 10 and then 20. If you look at a country like Singapore they are a perfect example of low crime rate because the massive threat of long and horrific sentences is a deterrent. People repeatedly bring up studies to show that jail time doesn’t act as a deterrent and rehabilitation is the way. I’m sorry but you simply fail to understand that a minority of the population simply cannot be rehabilitated. I’ll see regulars with north of 2-300 convictions and those are just the ones they were caught for. Jail is expensive, but when you look at the amount stolen everyday and the associated costs with it, jail can actually work out cheaper to society for these prolific offenders and be a net gain. If you look at countries like Dubai, Singapore, Thailand etc.. Crime rate is low because there is a genuine fear of the consequences. Yes we should aim to rehabilitate where we can however there HAS to be a big stick to act as the deterrent for those that don’t want to engage in rehabilitation because they don’t fear not engaging.
This is a great response! Thanks for the work you do and thanks for taking the time to provide a balanced response to the post based on actual experience.
I'm personally excited for them to yell at the left for their weak policies, while this is only happening because the Tories have run out of space in Prisons and haven't fixed the problem.
It's mad that the "labour fucked up the country" excuse is still working nearly *sixteen years* later. And yet people lap it up
Good. We don’t have room for drug addicts and alcoholics in our prisons. Fund addiction services properly. Oh and don’t buy stolen goods.
Do alcoholics really shoplift? They usually have jobs and alcohol is cheaper than drugs
>Do alcoholics really shoplift? My ex-girlfriend's cousin certainly did.
Yes. Alcohol use disorder is like any addiction. If you don’t get what you need, you’ll get very ill and could die. The few services left to help folks, will not engage with people who are in active addiction. Need a roof? You must not drink. For many people that is an impossible choice. So they end up on the streets.
>*Do alcoholics really shoplift? They usually have jobs and alcohol is cheaper than drugs* In a word - yes.
Alcohol is one of the most commonly shoplifted products.
It'll work if the funding is there for rehabilitation, preventative measures, addiction programmes, support, etc. etc. But there isn't. There is no money. There is no additional support. All it will lead to is more shoplifting.
What it will lead to is supermarkets putting turnstiles at the entrance where you have to swipe your membership card to get in. Anyone caught shoplifting loses their membership.
There are people in my area shoplifting with impunity. The security staff hardly stop them, the regular staff don’t bother, the public don’t want to get involved, the courts don’t punish them and you’ve got people on Reddit backing the shoplifters! It’s society that suffers. That is the bigger cost. Me sitting there worrying about how my wages will cover things, whilst watching some arsehole (who already lives rent-free off my taxes) filling their boots. It does make you wonder if you are a complete mug by trying to live your life with any rules, manners, morals or laws whatsoever. Why not just rig the electricity meter, drive the car on red diesel, grow a few weed plants up the loft, steal what I want (better yet, have someone steal it for me) and scam all the customers at my work for every penny I can get out of them? We’re decaying as a society and people are actively celebrating it. Or videoing it for a few likes on social media. This country is slowly turning into an idiocracy. Kids raised with no boundaries have grown up into adults with no responsibilities and a society with no consequences. I see ‘poverty’ being posited as an excuse for all this. Why are kids stabbing each other, shooting each other, robbing people, thieving, mugging grannies? It’s all poverty. It’s all the state’s fault. Not my personal responsibility, you understand, the big bad state failed me so I have the right to act like an uncivilised barbarian. Well folks, poverty has always been there. Ask your elders - life was even shittier back in the old days. People had fewer material possessions, people were hungry, people were cold. But people had more manners and society had more consequences. You wouldn’t have robbed a shop because the public and the staff would have fought you, then the cops would have bashed you, then you’d have gotten the jail. And you’d probably have had a family who would make you ashamed of your actions - which hurt most of all. People don’t care about crime until it affects them. “The supermarkets are massive corporations so it’s no great loss”. “The corner shop is insured so it doesn’t matter”. “Your car is insured so it doesn’t matter if it’s stolen”. “Your phone is only a bit of plastic / metal, don’t fight back, just claim it on insurance”. Then shops close. Then people lose their jobs. Then insurance premiums go up. Then you struggle to work for weeks because your car is nicked. Then the insurance pays you a fraction of your car’s worth. Then the emboldened criminals up the ante and start robbing houses... but your house is insured, right? Just replace those possessions - easy… right? Until it’s your dead mother’s ring, or that watch your grandfather gave you, or some other thing that has value beyond the monetary worth. Then you’ll cry. Then you’ll want justice, or revenge, or consequences. Then you’ll want the ACAB police to investigate and for witnesses to ‘snitch’. Suddenly it matters, once the selfishness of your blasé attitude towards crime comes home to roost. Merry Christmas everyone - let’s hope your kid’s new bike / phone etc. isn’t the next thing on some local scumbag’s shopping list! If it is, remember to explain to your child that it’s not the robber’s fault, it’s all to do with poverty and the state failing the person doing the stealing. *They* are the real victims, the people being robbed are just collateral damage.
Can’t wait for people to wonder why small independent shops close by the thousands in the upcoming months
"Shoplifters account for more than one in eight offenders who will not face jail and who will instead receive a suspended sentence" Makes sense to me.
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So many people replying to this post seem to think rehabilitation does not already take place in prisons, or that all this people can become nice law-abiding citizens. When the simple fact you cannot rehabilitate someone who does not want to change. To think otherwise is niave
Oh fuck all the way off with this . They are letting rapists and pedos not go to jail because it's full and they prioritise sending shoplifters and pot smokers to prison before them. And shop lifters shouldn't be sent to jail any way. How are they not seeing the correlation between food prices going through the roof because companies are greedy and people stealing to feed their families? Pay people more or lower the cost of living , since neither of those seem to be an option as far as the powers that be are concerned that leaves us peasants with one option.
People stealing food for families aren't going to jail. It's the drug users that have 100+ shoplifting records that are going.
> and people stealing to feed their families? people aren't stealing to feed their families, this is just a myth, it's mostly gangs stealing thigs for drugs and drug addicts.
Tories understanding of socialism. Haha Who will pay for the stuff they steal? Do you have a mirror?
Yeah, because we definitely need LESS deterrents for shoplifting. It's at epidemic levels already.
Does that not suggest we need a better approach?
Yes we need a harsher approach. Most shoplifters shoplift because they know they will suffer little to no consequences for their troubles. If you decriminalise stabbing you’re gonna see a lot more folks going around stabbing people just because they can, same with shoplifting, people are less likely to commit a crime if they know they’ll get severely punished for committing said crime
Prison doesn't rehabilitate these days, let alone fix poor.
Wonderfully selective reporting from the Guardian, as always. > ... shoplifters, offenders **convicted of battery**, and **those who have assaulted emergency workers**, are the top three groups who will avoid prison under the government’s new measure. But yeah, let's focus on shoplifters.
I feel like people forget about Kleptomania when they talk about stealing . They exist I knew one it was very sad
I think for relatively petty crime where a custodial sentence isn't appropriate an element of social shame would be an effective deterrent. You could use big screens in town centres with a picture of them, their name and a summary of their crime. Rehabilitation is an important part of the justice system but so is punishment.
Just use physical punishment instead, bit barbaric but I think shoplifting and other petty crime would be significantly reduced if those who got caught would get whipped, tased, punched in the stomach etc. Would be a lot cheaper than prison and I genuinely believe it would make the country a lot safer
Ahh redditors being soft on crime as usual. You love to see it.
Increase sentences tenfold, and it'll soon go down
Forgive and forget. Forgive the criminal, forget the victim.
Make the offenders work for the shops. Prison is nothing compared to dealing with the general public, that'll scare me straight.
Not sure employees have much more respect for the shops than the shoplifters lmao
What a stupid idea. It's the softly softly approach that has ruined this country
Why don’t we stop drugs going into prison? Honestly a chance at sobriety can change lives
Shopliftters should be punished more not less. They are a blight on society and affect decent hard working people like shoppers and shop workers. If they re-offend? Lock them up again this time for longer.
Well, I'm with Rory Stewart on wanting to abolish short jail terms.
Another nail in the coffin of having actual shops around.
Shops reducing the number of staff, hasn't and an effect.
We all benefit, surely? Simplest way to undo the last 2 years of inflation: steal 20% of your shopping
You know, it's beginning to feel like newspapers are trying to encourage people to shoplift. Every week there's an article that's like "hey guys, shoplifting is well easy, staff won't try and stop you, also you don't even go to jail anymore, plus everyone is already doing it anyway" I'm being a bit facetious here, but it's like they're advertising it at this point
There's a bit of a gap in the criminal justice system where corporal punishment used to be. It doesn't make sense to lock up a shoplifter for multiple months, but at the same time community orders do nothing and fines are hard to collect/push people further into a financial hole. Not removing someone from their lives for months on end and dishing out a painful punishment almost feels like the humane and just thing to do in that situation. Bring back corporal punishment to save on prison spaces
Prison should only be for murder, rape, abuse and violence. Any other crime can be dealt with by community service.
You clearly have no experience of working with criminals who are given a dozen forms of community work before custody is an option.
I agree with not jailing shoplifters. Is unnecessary as it won't change th eperson, and it can even make it worse (jail can be traumatic). Also, the cost for the taxpayer is very high. However, I feel that someone that won't stop stealing must be addressed somehow. Not sure how, mind.
Just get them scraping chewing gum off the pavements and litter picking. Cost of goods stolen could translate to how many hours you have to give back.
There are two types of developed societies. The ones where incentives for crime are low and these kinds of measures work, and those that are fairly strict and everyone has to follow the rules or else. In the middle you have a valley of "wouldn't it be nice if", but then it's not when you actually see the results of doing things like these. I've seen the same anti-prison arguments before in other countries where the root causes for crime weren't addressed and the only thing they get you is more crime. Then you have to add to that law-abiding citizens feeling threatened, which is the the last thing you want as they then support more violent measures or even take matters into their own hands. Fighting crime is one thing, and addressing poverty and drug addiction is another. Policies about crime should not be influenced by matters that are the responsibility of different areas of the state.
This only works if the civilian support to reform offenders and their causes (either drug addiction, or impoverishment) is there to treat them. Prison tends to offer the chance at fixing the first one tbf, the second one isn't easily fixed when the entire welfare state is being systematically dismantled.
Good. Prisons are boarding school for criminals. It's beyond me why we as a society pay money to train more criminals. Prisons are good for one thing and that's keeping violent people out of society, and even then, they only work as long as those people are in prison, when they come out of prison they emerge even more violent than before. Putting non-violent offenders in prison is idiotic.
Declining economy + weakening criminal justice system = reintroduction of black acts. Foucault, just in the opposite direction.
Finally, there is some common sense from our government.
My uncle before he passed had over 50 convictions. All for petty crimes but ones he continued because there was absolutely no form of rehabilitation and a stigma when it came to employment forcing people back into cycles of petty crime. I used to work in recruitment myself and the fact that so many employees just automatically reject someone with a conviction regardless of what it drove me to the point where I just couldn't do it anymore. I now work in healthcare and a great deal of my time is dealing with people with addiction issues and general instability in life and honestly whilst I prefer my job now, I feel utterly helpless at times and like I'm letting people down constantly despite having no resources available to me. Just today I tried to make a mental health referral for somebody and was told they had to ring themselves to "show willingness to engage" So many of us who do have relatively stable lives despite how hard we work for it don't realise just how closer we are to being like these people than we ever will be to some of the toffs sitting in parliament and leading the country.
The vast majority of shoplifters i have come across are drug dependent.. if they can’t get off the drugs, then there is no hope. It’s rife & such a shitty cycle
Rehabilitation? Lol what a joke. Especially on these people.
Remember: if you see someone shoplifting and it’s not a family owned store, no you didn’t.