What the hell do you have to do to get sent to jail these days?

NORMAn Stanley Fletcher, you are an habitual criminal who accepts arrest as an occupational hazard and presumably accepts a suspended sentence and the odd bit of community service in the same casual manner.

‘We therefore feel constrained to commit you to the absolute minimum term allowed for these offences. Push off and don’t do it again.’

Doesn’t have the same ring to it somehow, does it?

These days Fletch wouldn’t be banged up for a five- stretch in Slade Prison, he’d be given 18 months, suspended for two years, and sentenced to 120 hours watering the hanging baskets on Muswell Hill Broadway.

That’s provided he claimed he had only broken into the local jewellers’ shop as part of a sincere protest against climate change, fossil fuels, racial inequality and/or the slave trade. If all else failed, he could always plead that he came from a deprived, working class background and was therefore entitled to be dealt with leniently.

What do you have to do to get sent to jail these days? Apart, that is, from ‘misgendering’ someone in Scotland, where stating that a person with a penis is not a woman can now get you up to seven years solitary in Barlinnie.

Courts continue to hand down ludicrously soft sentences to those who claim they only broke the law in pursuit of a good cause.

On Friday, Roger Hallam — one of the founders of Extinction Rebellion — escaped jail after being convicted of attempting to use drones to ‘paralyse’ Heathrow airport.

It is impossible to understate the irresponsibility of this deranged stunt, which was part of a protest against plans for a third runway. A stray drone could easily have brought down an aircraft, causing carnage. If an Islamist group had been behind the plot, it would have been considered a major terrorist incident.

The last time there was a terror threat at Heathrow, after 9/11, Tony Blair sent in the tanks. Yet Hallam and two other XR headbangers merely received suspended sentences and community service.

THE judge said he was satisfied all three men were committed to the principle of ‘ non- violence’ and were ‘naive’ about the potential consequences of their actions. naive? Hallam is 57 years old. He’s a lifelong environmental activist, wedded to civil disobedience, who makes no secret of his intention to cause the maximum disruption in pursuit of his goal of ending the use of fossil fuels. In 2019 he was cleared by a jury of causing criminal damage to King’s College London, after arguing that it was a ‘ proportionate response to the climate crisis’.

His XR co- founder Gail Bradbrook also escaped with a suspended sentence after causing more than £27,500 damage to the Department of Transport.

If she’d been a football hooligan kicking in the windows of a Government ministry she’d have gone directly to jail.

Judges and juries are frequently handing down acquittals and soft sentences to offenders who claim to be acting out of political principle, particularly over global warming or racial justice.

Elsewhere, a Black Lives Matter fraudster who stole £ 70,000 raised for charity has not been ordered to pay back the money. Xahra Saleem, 23, organised the protests which toppled the statue of slave trader Edward Colston in Bristol during the Summer of Stupidity riots in the wake of the killing of George Floyd in Minnesota in 2020. Off the back of those protests, she set up an online fundraising page for a Bristol-based youth charity.

She raised £70,000 but the youth group didn’t receive a penny. Bristol Crown Court heard that she spent the money on ‘lifestyle expenses’, including beauty treatments, takeaway deliveries, clothes, mobile phones and £5,800 on Ubers.

In Saleem’s case, she was jailed last year for two-and-a-half years, of which she’ll probably only serve half. When she appeared at a Proceeds of Crime hearing on Friday, she pleaded poverty and was ordered to repay a token £1.

So that’s all right then.

You might have thought stealing from a charity would warrant a much harsher sentence and insistence on full repayment. But the judge took into account her ‘age and immaturity’. She’s 23, for goodness’ sake, an age at which many of us are married, have kids and hold down a responsible job.

We can’t be sure if the judge’s leniency owed anything to Saleem’s involvement with BLM. But this wasn’t the first, and won’t be the last, time the courts have gone soft on offenders associated with fashionable protest movements.

WITH the prison population overflowing, reasons for imposing noncustodial sentences are proliferating. Under a new bill before the Commons, one- year jail terms would be scrapped and replaced by suspended sentences.

The Sentencing Council for England and Wales has just published guidelines instructing courts to show leniency to offenders from ‘ deprived, difficult or socially disadvantaged’ backgrounds. They should take into account poverty, poor housing and experience of deprivation before sending anyone to prison.

Presumably, were they around today the Kray Twins would be given the benefit of the doubt and a Get Out Of Jail Free card.

‘M’lud, my client Mr Ronald Kray admits shooting Mr George Cornell at The Blind Beggar public house. But in mitigation, I would point out that Mr Kray and his brother are from a difficult, socially disadvantaged background in London’s East End.

‘Mr Cornell was only killed after he called Ronald Kray a “fat poof”. My client therefore was justified in striking a blow against homophobia on behalf of the vulnerable LGBTQWERTY+ community.’

Case dismissed!