As the first term of the university year begins, the young will be wondering what direction their lives should take. Anyone with their best interests at heart should tell them to forget about academic honours and seek a career in Britain’s booming crime sector instead.

Job security, a decent income, the chance to be your own gang boss… all the things an ambitious young person could want are there for the taking – quite literally in many cases. I can see a future when the criminal will be seen as Britain’s new model citizen: our freshly minted Homo brexiticus. Criminals are natural Tories, after all. They are nothing if not entrepreneurial, and they hate the overbearing rules and regulations of faceless bureaucracies.

Unlike in other careers, it doesn’t necessarily pay to be too ambitious. Murder someone and even our hacked-back police service may take notice. It’s better to get your head down and learn your craft from the bottom up. If you practise burgling or dealing, the chances are the nanny state will not interfere with your business.

The proportion of suspects who are caught and punished for all crimes has more than halved over the past five years to 9%. Get to minor crimes and even that clear-up rate looks good. Only 3% of burglaries and 4% of robberies were solved last year. Because criminals follow the tax-efficient policy, much admired in the City, of telling the Inland Revenue as little as possible, it’s hard to give the aspiring trainee an idea of pay and benefits packages on offer. Surrey University reported that the top cyber criminals could make £1.4m a year. Regrettably, graduates with an arts degree will lack the necessary background in computing – online fraudsters who have completed dissertations on female transgression in the 19th-century novel are scandalously underrepresented on the dark web.

They could, however, use their communication skills in dealing. A conservative estimate from 2103 put the basic income of a street seller at the bottom of a crime gang at £450 a week. (At £23,450 per annum it’s not a fortune, but considerably more than the £19,000 starting rate in the HR racket.)

Criminals who forgo academia have no student debt to repay and can expect tax bills so small even Amazon would pay them

A suggestion that higher rewards were on offer came in 2014 when the Office for National Statistics estimated that Britain’s economy would be £65bn larger if it incorporated the proceeds from drug dealing and prostitution into its figures. It’s worth careers advisers mentioning that criminals who forgo academia have no student debt to repay and can expect tax bills so small even Amazon would pay them. The more forward-thinking among them might tell their students that smuggling across the Channel and Irish Sea will be a sunrise industry once we leave the single market and the greatest rewards will go to early adopters.

Even if they are caught, the punishment can turn out to be no punishment at all. Austerity has destroyed the Conservatives’ claim to be the party of law and order. George Osborne’s cuts to the police service saw numbers fall by 19,921 between 2010 and 2017. The cuts to legal aid and the Crown Prosecution Service all but guarantee the innocent will suffer while the guilty go free. Meanwhile, the neglect of the jails is such that, far from restraining criminals, the government has allowed gangsters to take over much of the prison system and bribe hundreds of officers to bring them drugs and phones.

The jails can’t rehabilitate existing prisoners and can barely handle new ones. Scrambling to stop a crisis that is not of his making, the prisons minister, Rory Stewart, has told the judiciary that prison sentences of less than a year should be scrapped. This sounds a liberal solution to a dangerously overcrowded and understaffed system. Indeed, prison reform charities have been calling for it for years. But consider the consequences. The probation service, already reduced to a shabby affair by austerity and a botched privatisation, needs to be able to threaten offenders who break the terms of their orders with incarceration.

Now they cannot and documents leaked to the Mail on Sunday showed that not just petty criminals who reoffended while serving community sentences but serious criminals, up to and including murderers, who broke the rules when they were out on licence, were being spared custody. Probation officers are told to ask if they hold “conscious or unconscious bias” against criminals that makes them want to see them behind bars and to consider if the offender is merely “struggling to adapt to freedom”. Everything possible is done to avoid custody whatever the consequences for the victims of crime. Or as Merseyside police put it: “This is a clear example of legislation being introduced to reduce one problem (prison population) but causes an increase on demand on other areas and may place the community and victims at serious risk of harm.”

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Any party that was serious about law and order would reverse the disastrous consequences of Osborne’s term as chancellor. (Consequences that Osborne neurotically avoids mentioning in his London Evening Standard.) It would build prisons that could rehabilitate inmates rather than leave them under the rule of gangsters. It would not just recruit more police officers but more social workers who might divert the young from crime. Until change comes, crime is far more of a risk-free career than the complacent imagine.

“If only 3% of burglars are punished, only the stupidest burglars are in danger,” the victims’ rights campaigner Harry Fletcher told me. “Even if they are convicted, the probation service cannot threaten sanctions to encourage them to go straight.”

Many people bemoan the intergenerational unfairness that has left the young without homes of their own, secure jobs and decent pensions. The best way to rectify it would be to urge the young to turn to crime. Given the glittering prizes that await, it would be criminal not to.

• Nick Cohen is an Observer columnist