Spare shoplifters jail to ease burden on prisons, says ex DPP

SHOPLIFTERS should be spared prosecution and jail to help tackle court backlogs and overcrowded prisons, says the former head of the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS).

Sir Max Hill said the Government should consider dealing with acquisitive crime such as shoplifting outside the court system through schemes designed to tackle the causes of the criminality.

“We should be looking again at whether it is necessary to take every case into court. I don’t mean offences of violence. I certainly don’t mean sexual crimes but some acquisitive crimes. Shoplifting, for example,” he told a BBC Radio 4 Today debate.

He cited Durham police’s Checkpoint scheme as an example, which slashed reoffending rates by burglars, shoplifters and thieves by sparing them prosecution in return for them undergoing rehabilitation for problems such as drug or drink abuse.

Under the scheme, offenders could walk away without a criminal conviction if they completed a four-month contract with police. If they did not, they were prosecuted in the traditional way. Of the first 2,6609 offenders involved in the trial, only 166 (six per cent) reoffended.

“By taking cases out of court, they have reduced recidivism even for frequent shoplifters. That’s one point that we should look at again,” said Sir Max.

His comments come as ministers have piled pressure on police to crackdown on an “epidemic” of shoplifting which has seen the number of offences pass 400,000 in a year for the first time.

The British Retail Consortium warned yesterday that the cost of shoplifting has doubled to £1.8billion with more than 45,000 incidents a day. But the backlog of cases in the court system is at a record high of 66,000, double the level before the pandemic struck in 2020. Of those, 6,500 cases have been stuck in the court system for more than two years, up from just 530 in 2019.

Charlie Taylor, the chief inspector of prisons, also warned that jails were “right on the edge” of being unable to take any more prisoners because they were so overcrowded.

The Telegraph revealed earlier this month that ministers have been warned that prisons are on course to run out of space by the spring.

‘We have a system that is overstretched. That’s why we have to now look at creative solutions’