Daily Mail 4th September 2008
Mike Fuller: Soft sentences are making our job more difficult
Dangerous criminals are avoiding jail or being released early from prison due to a chronic shortage of prison places, one of the country's most senior policemen has claimed.
Mike Fuller, chief constable of Kent Police, said the Government's failure to provide extra capacity in Britain's jails is making the job of officers more difficult.
He said it had led courts to handing out 'soft' non-custodial sentences - allowing dangerous and repeat offenders to walk back on to the streets.
He cited several cases in his own force, including a burglar with 100 previous convictions who was handed a suspended sentence - and then committed another burglary.
A serial thief was also given bail while awaiting sentence for 255 thefts from motor vehicles - only to fail to appear at court.
Mr Fuller said: 'The feeling is police do their bit, they catch dangerous offenders, and sentencing policy is determined by prison places.
'Sentencing policy would appear to be determined more by the number of prison places rather than the seriousness of the crimes people have committed.
'That means recidivist offenders are being released from prison when they should not be.
'People committing serious and violent crimes are not receiving as long sentences as they should, making the job of police more difficult.
'It's a police perception - it's also my perception.'
Mr Fuller, who is an outside tip to be the next commissioner at Scotland Yard, said the Government's policies have damaged public confidence in the criminal justice system, while officer morale was also hit by seeing offenders spared jail.
He blamed the crisis on a failure to provide more prison spaces after Government directions five years ago that police should bring more offenders to justice.
'One would have to point to the Government on that,' he said in an interview with the Guardian today.
'Sentencing is crucial to confidence. The Government has underestimated how important sentencing is to public confidence.'
Mr Fuller is Britain's first black chief constable and a qualified barrister.
He made his name by setting up Operation Trident to tackle gun violence within London's black communities, before taking over as Kent police chief in 2004. He is also a former chairman of the Black Police Association.
Other rivals for the top job at the Met include Ulster police chief Sir Hugh Orde, Bernard Hogan-Howe from Merseyside and Sir Norman Bettison from West Yorkshire.
UK Lockdown point of view
Policies dictated by the EU are the real reason crime is flourishing in our society and one of those policies is to either release prisoners early or to give them very light sentences in order to allow them back out as early as possible so they can get back to the important work of sabotaging our society on the behalf of the EU, Fuller is only attempting to cover up the role of the police in this whole affair it is known that the common purpose (EU sabotage operation) has a number of agents within the police force especially at the senior level, hence Strong police presence whenever there is any form demo or protest against the effects of EU policies that are destroying our country and removing more of our freedoms every day; in short the police themselves are complicit in the conspiracy and have not only been found to be corrupt at all levels throughout the force but are also heavily in line with the enforcement of the EU police state agenda ranging from nonsense such as harassing citizens over household waste to the frequent misuse of stop and search & terror laws against people they know are neither criminals or terrorists
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