If you want to understand the prison crisis, look at the Sycamore tree case

There are around 3 billion trees in Britain. Had the two most hated men in the country decided to fell any of 2,999,999,999 of them, they’d be going about their daily life today and we wouldn’t even know who they are.

But because they decided to chop down a very specific tree, they are now in prison serving a sentence of more than four years; the equivalent of manslaughter or the lowest possible sentence for rape.
It is a ridiculous sentence for chopping down a tree, regardless of which tree it was.

Imagine the sentence for murder depended on who you murder.
Murder a nationally cherished icon and you receive a life sentence. Murder a homeless down-and-out, on the other hand, and it matters much less or even not at all.

I believe that all trees are beautiful national treasures to be cherished, and also that they are all created equal.
And I believe that public sentiment (or the anger of the mob, to put it more bluntly) should not be able to dictate what happens in a courtroom.

Emotion needs to stay out of the courtroom, and so does politics.

Unfortunately, in the UK, criminal justice is both highly political as well as emotional.
It is used by the government as a method of control, similar to how we see it in dictatorships. It is, on the other hand, also used as a method of scoring easy points with an emotional, often unreasonably outraged public.

You’ll know this all too well if you are a climate protestor or if you’re trying to stop the government from being complicit in the genocide in Gaza.
You’ll also realise this if you are the perpetrator of a crime that has received national media attention and therefore receive a harsher sentence than you normally would.

The fable of creating a strong deterrent by ‘setting an example’

Proponents of a harsh prison sentence for this act of vandalism argue that you need to set an example to deter others from doing the same.
‘If you let these two vandals get away with it, what will stop the next person from desecrating other landmarks?’ goes the reasoning. Sooner or later, chaos and unrest will break out, all national landmarks desecrated and destroyed. It’s therefore important to send out a message to avoid mayhem.

I have two objections to this line of thinking.

Firstly, deterrence doesn’t actually work.
If it did work, surely the death sentence would discourage people from committing murders. But the fact is that US states that have the death sentence have higher homicide rates than the ones that don’t.
Across the world, on average, the countries that have the death sentence for murder have higher homicide rates; which is one of many examples that demonstrate that deterrence actually hardly works.

The reasons people commit crimes are complicated and have very little to do with the severity of possible sentences they face.
If we want to reduce crime, we need to look at the causes of crime in society, not make sentences more severe.

Secondly, not sending someone to prison does not mean you’re letting them get away with it. We seem to have forgotten that there are other, more effective ways to serve criminal justice.

The sentence that I would have proposed in this case would be a very strict community order; consisting of a criminal record (a harsh punishment in itself), hundreds of hours of planting trees and other beneficial community works on weekends for at least a year, plus a determined time of being under house-arrest, from 6pm to 6am, monitored by a GPS tag.
In what world is that not punishment and setting an example?

The benefits would be that the two men could continue working and paying taxes, wouldn’t have their lives and their mental health ruined (more than they already have), that the taxpayer would save hundreds of thousands of pounds, and that we would stop overfilling prisons, which brings me to the next, important point.

The reason prisons are in crisis

The reason for the prison crisis is quite simple – we are sending too many people for too long into prisons that aren’t fit for purpose.
From 1990 to today we have more than doubled the prison population from 40,000 to nearly 90,000 today, whilst crime rates actually fell during the same period. 
The reason is sentence inflation – sentences have become massively longer for the same offences than they were a few decades ago, plus new types of crimes are constantly introduced.

At the same time, we have not invested in prisons and cut funding as well as staff numbers. The results are prisons that are overcrowded, underfunded, massively understaffed, rife with drugs and violence, and not able to fulfil their basic functions.

We are constantly worrying how the government can plug holes in their finances, without having to cut benefits, services or having to raise taxes.
Yet nobody wants to mention that the prison system is haemorrhaging enormous amounts of money whilst doing more harm than good and actually increasing crime due to high reoffending rates.
I find it astonishing that we all worry so much about the cost of living, scrutinising every public expense, yet whenever someone is sent to prison for many years we never question how much that will cost.

A functioning prison system would cost less and have better outcomes.

But if we continue to send people to prison that shouldn’t be there (this case is just one example of thousands – even the Prison Minister agrees that a third of inmates shouldn’t be in prison), we will never have a system that works.

We need to overcome our emotional reflexes, and instead look at what will actually make things better. I know it goes against many people’s instincts, but a society with less prison is a happier and safer society.