Crime has fallen, yet here we are again, facing a prisons crisis

Editorial: We are paying the price for our failure to capitalise on the opportunity to develop a more humane policy during the pandemic

Just because we have been here before does not make our prison system any less shameful (iStock)

The most recent figures suggest that crime has fallen to the lowest level since the beginning of reliable survey data 41 years ago. Admittedly, the figures are hard to compare, because crimes of fraud and computer misuse have been recorded only for the past six years – and internet scams did not exist in 1982.

But taking into account the change in the types of crime covered by the Crime Survey for England and Wales, the latest figures, for the calendar year 2022, strongly suggest a good-news story that is rarely reported. The Crime Survey is a good measure of the prevalence of crime, because it is based on what a random sample of people report has happened to them, rather than relying on the police to record crimes.

The Independent argues that, since crime has fallen, we should need to put fewer people in prison. There are those who would argue the opposite – namely that it is only because the prison population has risen, which it started to do, sharply, in the mid-1990s, that crime has fallen.