HAVE LONGER SENTENCES REDUCED CRIME?

In very simple terms it might be said that a criminal justice system has three prime concerns; to punish, to deter and to rehabilitate miscreants. Until relatively modern times rehabilitation was off the menu. Christian churches were there to undertake what the state had not even considered. Punishment went hand in hand with deterrence as the main purpose for dealing with those who broke the law.

In the early nineteenth century the law could impose death for property offences which today would be dealt with by a magistrates court and Parliament itself was increasingly horrified by the consequences. Although the law allowed it no child is known to have actually been hanged in England for simple theft; they were generally reprieved usually with transportation substituted.  However at Maidstone on 1 August 1831 14 year old John Bell was hanged for murder. 

There is a strong historical argument that the political changes associated with the Reform Act helped create the parliamentary climate in which the "Bloody Code" was dismantled during the 1830s. In 1832 Parliament began to recognise that the severity of a punishment could undermine the credibility of the law itself. In the following five years capital punishment was removed for several forms of theft, including cattle and sheep stealing and certain forms of robbery and the death penalty was also abolished for most forgery offences. By 1837 hanging had been removed from many more offences until it was abolished in 1965. For those who suggest that the current trend towards longer sentences is a necessary deterrent in an increasingly lawless society the reality can be quite a shock.


The homicide rate in England and Wales was about 1.96 per 100,000 in 1865. From 1902 to 1974 the homicide rate remained below 1 per 100,000. Indeed in 1965 the rate was 0.68 per 100,000. So homicide fell by roughly two-thirds from the 1865 peak to 1965 despite the continued availability of the death penalty for murder. It would appear that homicide rates have historically moved for reasons much more complicated than the severity of the maximum sentence. Are there grounds for thinking that such analysis could be applied to other serious but lesser offending?


On more than one occasion here I have considered "crime figures" as a work of intensive imagination dependent upon the origin of such statistics and the political purposes which drive them. The table below uses selected major offences recorded by the police, England and Wales, 2002–2025.

It is striking that burglary and criminal damage are 75% and 61% respectively lower but robbery is 23% lower. The Crime Survey for England and Wales (CSEW), formerly the British Crime Survey, provides the best long-term measure of the amount of crime experienced by the public.

The average custodial sentence length rose from 12.0 months in 1995 to 19.9 months in 2025 and the prison population rose from about 51,000 in 1995 to 86,000–87,000 today. From 1995 to 2025 violent crime fell by 71% and theft fell by 78% whilst the homicide rate roughly halved. During this period the average custodial sentence rose by 66% and the prison population by 71%. The crime decline began while average sentences were actually falling or broadly flat. Can crime reduction actually be attributed to the additional years of imprisonment? From the above chart it can be seen that the Ministry of Justice confirms the rise in average custodial sentence length from 13.7 months in 2010 to 21.3 months in 2023. The Sentencing Academy calculates that the average for indictable-only offences rose from 38.7 months in 2010 to 70 months in 2024. In this period longer custodial sentences and falling crime occurred during the same period.

The question is how much, if any, of the reduction in crime can reasonably be attributed to the additional years of imprisonment?  Many big brains more enlightened than mine have tried to understand the above numbers and millions more in an attempt  to produce answers for their political masters and a public which feels increasingly at personal risk from violent criminality. The rise in victimhood exacerbates this situation with tabloid calls for ever longer sentences inconsistent with the approaching no room at the inn situation with prison capacity.

The only conclusion, however tenuous, from those millions of numbers is that current evidence does not establish that the additional years of imprisonment produced a substantial general deterrent effect.  The corollary is that sentencing will continue to be as much politically driven as it is judicially or statistically.