No jail for the conman

The Bellend of the Month for August 2013 is Andrew Ashworth, who is the Vinerian Professor of English Law at Oxford University. He stated this month that thieves and fraudsters should not be jailed. According to Ashworth, jail should be reserved for offenders who commit crimes of a violent, sexual, or threatening nature. That does not seem right at all. Most property crimes are already treated leniently by the criminal justice system for the very reason that they do not involve violence. But the type of crime is not a reliable indicator of the impact that an offence has on a victim. People who commit these crimes, or any crime for that matter, devastate lives and cause untold misery in the community. It would be hard for community sentences to retain public confidence if offenders knew they could keep committing certain types of crime and never be jailed. The idea that governments should ban judges from sending offenders to jail for theft and fraud is completely wrong, because you also have to deal with the reality that for those offenders who do receive short sentences, it's because community penalties have already failed time and time again.