In the Spectator Dalrymple goes on the attack against the British political class’s disinterest in reducing crime, decrying its statistical manipulation and use of punishments, like community sentencing, that it knows full well do not work:

…the problem is not how to make community sentences work, but how to create the misleading public impression that they do. This has for decades been the ruling imperative of that great friend to the British criminal, the Home Office (and now the Ministry of Justice). It struggles might and main not to reduce criminality but to reduce the public’s supposedly neurotic fear of crime, and it does so by sowing confusion — confusion with a roseate glow….

The British criminal justice system has become an elaborate sham, in which lawyers, private companies, the Home Office and criminals prey in concert on the rest of the population.

H/t Teddy M.