Nearly two-thirds of people convicted of crimes involving knives or other weapons were given custodial sentences last year, according to statistics showing more offenders are being jailed, and for longer periods, than ever before.
Official figures show 7,628 of 2017’s 20,982 knife and weapon offences – which include possession and making threats but stop short of assault – led to immediate custody, with a further 4,067 leading to suspended sentences.
That compares with 5,734 jail sentences and 2,649 suspended sentences handed down in 2008, amounting to about 42% of the 28,398 offences dealt with that year.
The Ministry of Justice figures, which come amid concern about a surge in knife violence, particularly in London, show that the average custodial sentence handed down has risen by 2.2 months over the past decade to 7.5 months in 2017, with conviction for a knife or weapon offence now more likely to result in some form of custodial sentence.
More than four-fifths of adult repeat offenders received a custodial sentence last year, the statistics also showed.
The combined total of 20,982 offences dealt with by the criminal justice system was the highest number for a calendar year since 2010, when there were 21,328. But it is still well below the 28,398 offences dealt with in 2008.
Last year’s tally was up by 9% on 2016, with the MoJ saying the increase in part reflects a 30% rise in police-recorded knife and offensive weapon possession offences in the year to September. The data also showed offenders were aged under 18 in 4,490 cases – a fifth of the total number handled.
Whitney Iles, the chief executive of Project 507, works with young people at risk of violence in prisons and in the community. She said the rise in knife crime showed that a punitive approach was not working.
“This is not something that we are going to arrest ourselves out of,” she said. “We need to start dealing with the root causes as much as locking people up for knife crime. We need to push our response back into the community and part of that is looking at a public health model for dealing with violence in England.”
