Picture a convicted burglar walking out of Pentonville Prison this morning. Statistical reality: there's now a 48.7% chance they'll commit another crime within two years. That's not just a number. That's a coin flip determining whether your neighbourhood is safe.

While Britain watches Trump's tariffs reshape global commerce, a more immediate crisis festers at home. Our criminal justice system has become a revolving door, and the data shows just how fast it's spinning.

The reoffending rate has exploded from 29.1% in 1943 to today's 48.7%. That's a 67% surge over eight decades. But here's the kicker: this isn't gradual decay. The steepest climb happened in recent years, as rehabilitation programmes were gutted and prison overcrowding reached crisis levels.

Every day, roughly 200 people leave British prisons. By these odds, 97 of them will be back in the dock within 24 months. They'll steal cars, burgle homes, deal drugs, or assault strangers. The victims won't be statistics in a government spreadsheet. They'll be real people whose lives get turned upside down because we failed to fix the problem the first time.

The mathematics are brutal. In 1943, seven out of ten offenders stayed clean after release. Today, barely five in ten manage it. We've essentially flipped the script: rehabilitation once worked for the majority, now it fails for the majority.

This isn't about being soft or hard on crime. It's about basic competence. When half your criminal justice interventions fail, you don't have a justice system. You have an expensive crime recycling programme funded by taxpayers.

Consider the economics while politicians debate trade deficits. Every reoffender costs the system tens of thousands in police time, court proceedings, and prison stays. Multiply that by the thousands cycling through annually, and you're looking at billions wasted on a system that creates more crime than it prevents.

The timing couldn't be worse. As businesses worry about tariff impacts on their bottom lines, communities face a different kind of economic hit: the cost of repeat crime. Insurance premiums, security measures, lost productivity from theft and vandalism.

Behind every percentage point lurk real consequences. Shop owners installing extra cameras. Families avoiding certain streets after dark. Pensioners triple-checking their locks. The ripple effects of a 48.7% reoffending rate touch every corner of British life.

The data doesn't lie, even when politicians might prefer it did. Nearly five decades of criminal justice policy have led us here: to a place where releasing a convicted criminal is essentially a gamble with public safety. And right now, the house is winning. (Source: Ministry of Justice, Proven Reoffending -- proven-reoffending_jan24_mar24_annual -- A4b_(annual_average))