Should you go to prison if you don’t do your job properly? That is the concept behind the government’s new regime for teachers, social workers, police and council staff dealing with young people. If they ignore cases of child sex grooming, they are tolerating what the prime minister bizarrely calls “a national threat”. They are guilty of “wilful neglect” and should go to jail “for up to five years”. In this grim Dutch auction, Labour’s Yvette Cooper says David Cameron “does not go far enough.”

Cameron is right to publicise the scale of neglect among officials in the Rotherham and Oxfordshire cases. Terrible abuse of young people passed under the scanner of local control. It did so largely because it involved intimate relationships between teenagers and their families, neighbours, carers and ethnic communities. Criminalising not the abuse but anyone who might have known about it must fall foul of the law of unintended consequences.

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Supervising the young involves meticulous professional judgment. It must balance the state against personal freedom and the rights and duties of parents. In 2002, a similar kneejerk response led to the Criminal Records Bureau and back-up checks on anyone in contact with children. It was chaotic. Careers were needlessly ruined. Teachers were barred from schools, and parents from car pools and after-school activities. It was a classic of hard cases making bad law.

Any professional can make mistakes that might harm others. That is why they are subject to the discipline of their peers. If the discipline becomes brittle and mistakes are criminalised, we know what happens. Everyone goes into defensive mode. Haringey social workers spend a third of their time filing reports. Hundreds more children go into care. GPs and A&E departments inundate the police with suspect injuries. Ethnic minorities are spied on. Decent people laugh when asked to do public service.

Professional negligence is a just cause for discipline or dismissal. But should a traffic officer go to jail for neglecting a dangerous road, or a doctor who misses a critical symptom, or a judge who lets a murderer go free? And what of an MP who passes a dangerously stupid law?

We cannot make a free society safe. We can only make it safer. This craze for gesture-jailing will not do that.