Nazir Afzal is a man of great courage and integrity (The G2 interview, 12 August). As a former prosecutor, he has faith in the criminal justice system’s ability to ensure that rioters’ actions will have consequences. Like Keir Starmer and the current director of public prosecutions, Stephen Parkinson, Afzal seems confident that deterrence works, and that the prospect of unusually swift and severe punishment is what is keeping people off the streets.
But the coincidence between the sentences imposed by the courts over recent weeks and the reduction in violence does not prove causation. There are other, equally plausible explanations for the ebbing of the tide, including the actions taken by thousands of counter-protesters and a failure of leadership, from Tommy Robinson in Ayia Napa, the culture warrior enablers in Reform UK and the Conservative party, suddenly afraid of the monster they have unleashed. The danger in thinking like a prosecutor and assuming that potential rioters are rational actors who can be deterred from attacking their local mosque is that we continue to see policing and punishment as a one-size-fits-all panacea for social problems, filling up our already grossly overcrowded and socially dysfunctional prisons in the process.
Bill Dixon
Professor of criminology, University of Nottingham
