Jail, of course, is the original deterrent. One that worked so well that CCTV was needed to augment it.

I thought you might enjoy the irony in seeing the well-heeled get collared.

This wasn’t thumbing the nose at Parliament, for example (which isn’t presently illegal), these were words written to organise crimes. That in this case they were ineffectual doesn’t make them less of a crime. I’ve argued elsewhere against ignoring or misattributing the societal causes of this violence, but those causes do not absolve the individuals concerned of personal responsibility. Planning a crime is itself a crime; how could it not be?

There’s an argument to be made that the sentences being handed out are too harsh, but I don’t think there’s a case to be made that trying to instigate a riot is an innocent or harmless activity that needs protecting.

In ours, for most of its history. “Qu’on me donne six lignes écrites de la main du plus honnête homme, j’y trouverai de quoi le faire pendre.” — “give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, and I shall find something therein to have him hanged.” It has been the norm in most times and places to consider speaking out against the rulers a capital offence. The usual state of humanity is that the privileged are enfeoffed of their local warlords; the remainder are in bondage, and neither class dare speak openly.

Which is to say, legality is a matter of implied potential punishment used as deterrent (sometimes paired with childhood conditioning) — which in a situation where the laws are not consistently enforced (or are consistently unenforced, or are sometimes or always unenforceable) means that deterrence is not only nonexistent but misleadingly nonexistent. As anyone who has studied gambling from the perspective of a behaviorist knows, making an example of the one guy you managed to enforce an otherwise unenforceable law on is a good way of making everyone else who already breaks it on a regular basis break it double-time (though it arguably leverages the availability bias to make people less likely to start, but it also encourages empathy for whoever got pantsed by the overzealous enforcement and encourages unity amongst those who empathize more with the breakers of that particular law than with the enforcers).

If you could consistently enforce every law then laws would work effectively as deterrents. However, most laws are put together under the assumption that they will not (and often cannot) be consistently enforced — and many exist primarily for the purpose of making it easier to enforce other laws. Jaywalking is the typical example: while it ostensibly exists to deter people from making dangerous crossings of busy streets, it is mostly applied to aid the police in other unrelated matters, since everyone needs to eventually cross the street (and someone running or walking away from police in a non-arrest context is not likely to wait for the light and use the zebra crossing); walking away from police who are not trying to arrest you is not illegal, but crossing the street in a manner that is considered insufficiently cautious can be. Were it to be enforced consistently, though, many people could never walk anywhere (there are too many streets with absolutely no crosswalks or stoplights anywhere).

In other words, law as deterrent is fairly broken. It does work on the compulsively law-abiding, but the compulsively law-abiding aren’t likely to make much trouble anyway.

Btw, i read a claim that someone stole £1 worth of water during the riots and got 6 months. Wtf i say.

As to “softening” the laws, the in UK they’ve just handed a man four years in gaol for “encouraging rioting” (not actually rioting, but encouraging others to do so) on Facebook. In what universe losing four years of your life for writing the wrong words “soft?”