A prisoner escaping London hospitals twice in a week makes for dramatic headlines. But here's the number that should terrify you more: 48.7% of all British offenders now reoffend within two years of their original sentence.

That's nearly one in two criminals walking free only to commit fresh crimes. And it's getting worse, fast.

The Ministry of Justice data reveals a justice system in freefall. Back when the current system was taking shape, just 29.1% of offenders returned to crime. Today, that figure has rocketed to 48.7% - a staggering 67% increase that represents one of the most dramatic policy failures in modern Britain.

Think about what this means in practice. Every time you read about someone convicted of burglary, assault, or theft, there's now a coin-flip chance they'll do it again within 24 months. The woman whose house gets broken into, the pensioner who gets mugged, the family whose car gets stolen - nearly half the time, their attacker is someone the system has already caught, processed, and released.

This isn't about a handful of dangerous individuals gaming the system. This is systemic failure on an industrial scale. We're creating a revolving door that spins faster every year, churning out repeat offenders at a rate that would have been unthinkable a generation ago.

The timing couldn't be worse. While child abuse cases become more complex and police resources stretch thinner, we're simultaneously failing to stop known criminals from striking again. Every reoffence represents not just another victim, but another failure of deterrence, rehabilitation, and public protection.

Politicians love to promise they're tough on crime. But these numbers expose the opposite: a system so broken that it's actively manufacturing more criminals than it stops. When someone commits their first offence, we now have less than a 52% chance of preventing them from doing it again.

The contrast with earlier decades is stark. Something fundamental shifted in how Britain handles criminal justice, and the results are measurable in hundreds of thousands of preventable crimes. Whether it's underfunded probation services, overcrowded prisons, or inadequate rehabilitation programmes, the current approach is failing catastrophically.

Every dramatic escape story distracts from this deeper truth: the real crisis isn't the criminals who flee custody, but the ones we release on schedule only to watch them return to the courts within months. (Source: Ministry of Justice, Proven Reoffending -- proven-reoffending_jan24_mar24_annual -- A4b_(annual_average))