As ever, it follows the rise in employment and the good economy. How much Labour can claim this success is still hard to judge. Paul Wiles, Home Office head of research, says the projections were calculated on past behaviour, but times appear to have changed. More than 200,000 young people unemployed for over six months are now in jobs through the New Deal. One million more people are now in work.
More people now have many of the most often stolen goods.
Increasingly the luxuries of the rich are unstealable, such as foreign holidays. But changing people, not locks, takes time. The youth offender teams redirecting boys away from crime at their first offence will take another two or three years to provide measurable outcomes. The police are only just starting on new truancy sweeps to pick up children at the first risk of crime. A Cambridge study across the US, UK and Sweden found no correlation between numbers of people imprisoned and crime levels.