Luca Watson is a writer based in London and a contributor with Young Voices UK.
As the dust settles from the rioting that swept Britain two weeks ago, the state is going all out to find and punish participants. The Home Office continues to publish a constant stream of slick social media videos of police showing up at rioters’ doors and being taken into custody, with one unambiguous message: if you took part in these riots, the state is coming for you.
This attitude poses a stark contrast to the state’s usual approach to criminality, which has been dominated by lenient sentencing and an aversion to custodial terms. The severe sentences following these riots demonstrates judges are more invested in making examples of perpetrators, rather than upholding public safety when it counts.
Take Judge Catarina Sjolin Knight of Lincoln Crown Court, who sentenced a man to three years’ imprisonment for social media posts intended to stir up racial hatred and incite violence.
Just days prior, in a case unrelated to the riots, she had given a suspended sentence and community service to a man who repeatedly kicked a stranger in the head before leaving him bleeding and unconscious in the middle of a road.
When it comes to tackling violent crime, locking up those who stir up disorder certainly helps. But surely it’s nowhere near as important as imprisoning those who commit actual acts of violence, especially as extreme as beating a man to a pulp and leaving him for dead.
After decades of lenient sentences for dangerous criminals, the riots have given judges the excuse to flex their full power and start giving out some meaty punishments. While welcome and deserved in some cases, the febrile post-riot atmosphere has led to judges handing down unduly excessive sentences in a frenzied attempt to re-assert state power.
One of the first such cases was of Steven Mailen and Ryan Sheers, a gay couple from Hartlepool who stumbled across the riots after a day drinking at the bingo. Having made their way to the front of the police line, they taunted and gesticulated at officers, before getting taken down by a police dog and arrested. Hardly the crime of the century!
They asked the judge for mercy, noting they ‘despised’ the far-right and were against prejudices of all kinds. Yet despite their pleas, and even with a completely clean criminal record, both were given prison sentences of over two years each for violent disorder. A message had to be sent, and if that required an otherwise law-abiding couple to be sent to the slammer for years, so be it.
Such excessive sentences are made all the worse in light of the government’s decision to mitigate the threat of prison overcrowding by freeing thousands of criminals early. In practice, this means convicted killers are to be let out early to free up the prison capacity for those who shouted and gesticulated a bit too hard. Are we supposed to believe the British public is made safer by such prisoner swaps?
These are not the actions of a state which views protecting its citizens as its greatest duty, but of a regime prioritising symbolic shows of strength in an attempt to mask its woefully weakened capacity.
The harsh prison sentences for rioters show the state is aware of how effective prisons are for cracking down on crime, and is choosing to be highly selective in the application of this knowledge. When it feels itself threatened, it uses stiff prison sentences as the quickest way to restore order.
But for the crimes which constantly afflict the rest of us and can make life a living misery – burglaries, thefts, assaults, and so on – then the state plays dumb, and James Timpson, the new Prisons Minister, can be wheeled out to waffle about Britain being ‘addicted to sentencing’.
The reaction to the riots shows Britain’s judges have it within them to take a tough turn on offenders, and that given the right circumstances, they show little hesitation in doing so. Instead of only reaching for the heavy-handedness in times where the state feels attacked, it would be nice if a similar verve were shown when members of the British public faced themselves on the receiving end of every day crime and disorder.
