The news from across the Atlantic this week echoes with the stern clang of a cell door. In the United States, a group of anti-ICE rioters have been given sentences totalling 450 years. The British law-and-order model is being praised by US officials, who point to the UK’s own tough response to recent far-right riots. But for the working families I speak to in Manchester and Newcastle, the question is not about deterrence. It is about what this kind of justice costs them and their communities.
The riots in question involved setting fires, attacking police officers, and destroying property. There can be no excuse for such violence. I have stood on picket lines where tempers fray, and I have seen what happens when frustration boils over into lawlessness. It is the shops on the high street that get boarded up. It is the local bus driver who is afraid to work the night shift. The cost of chaos is never borne by those who foment it, but by the people who have the least to spare.
Yet 450 years is a staggering number. It feels less like justice and more like a political statement. Sentences that severe send a message that the state is willing to make examples of those who step out of line. In the UK, after the Southport riots, we saw swift jail terms of up to six years for those who attacked police and mosques. In both cases, the government is reaching for the same tool: a hard hammer.
The danger is that this hard hammer becomes the only tool in the box. When we talk about law and order in the real economy, the conversation is often about enforcement against the poor. We are locking up shoplifters for small thefts because food banks are overwhelmed. We are jailing people for minor drug offences while big pharma profits soar. The price of bread goes up, wages stay flat, and the state’s answer is longer sentences.
Union leaders I speak with are wary. They know that strong communities need safety, but they also know that safety does not come from jailing more people for longer. It comes from decent housing, well-funded youth clubs, and jobs that pay enough to live on. The US model of mass incarceration has not made American streets safer. It has created a permanent underclass. Britain should not be praised for adopting that model. We should be cautious.
The 450-year sentence will be touted as a deterrent. But deterrence works when there is a credible prospect of being caught and punished swiftly, not just when the eventual sentence is astronomically long. What deters crime is a visible police presence, a functioning justice system, and a society that offers hope. None of those are made stronger by simply adding years to a prison term.
I am mindful that for some readers, this will sound like excusing violence. I am not. Those who attack police officers or set fire to businesses must face consequences. But we need to ask what kind of society produces such rage. In Britain, the far-right riots were fuelled by misinformation and decades of neglect in towns left behind by globalisation. In the US, the anti-ICE protests spring from a frustration with an immigration system that criminalises people fleeing violence. The riots are symptoms, not causes.
So when the US looks to Britain and praises our law-and-order model, let us remember what that model looks like on the ground. It looks like a prison population that has nearly doubled in the last 30 years. It looks like overcrowded jails where rehabilitation is a myth. It looks like a system that saves the harshest penalties for the poorest offenders.
We need a justice that builds up, not just locks down. A justice that invests in the things that prevent crime: good jobs, strong unions, and communities where everyone has a stake. The 450-year sentence is a headline. It is not a solution.
For now, the price of bread is still too high. The rent is still due. And the fear of being engulfed by chaos is real. But the answer cannot be to simply build more cages. It must be to build a society that does not breed rioters in the first place.
