It is “justice week” in the new Boris Johnson government, where “Britain’s Trump” is living up to the transatlantic comparison by laying down his vision for law and order in England and Wales.

Johnson’s hardline approach will put more police on the streets, increase use of stop and search, and incarcerate more offenders with longer sentences.

“I want criminals to be afraid, not the public,” read the headline to his Mail on Sunday column. But so far the prime minister appears to be getting tough on crime without being so tough on – or interested in – its causes.

Under Johnson’s changes, more police officers, not just senior staff, will be able to authorise section 60 powers, which allow forces to designate specific areas where searches can take place without reasonable grounds of suspicion for a fixed period of time.

This enlarged pool of officers will need a lower degree of certainty, so they must reasonably believe an incident involving serious violence “may” rather than “will” occur.

The move unwinds one of the few more progressive moves made by his predecessor, Theresa May, who in 2014 restricted the use of section 60 as part of a broader package to limit the use of stop-and-search powers in the face of evidence that black people were far more likely to be stopped by the police than white people.

This disproportionality continues. Black people make up 15.6% of London’s population, while white people make up 59.8%. In 2018, 43% of searches were of black people, while 35.5% were of white people, according to official figures released last year from the London mayor’s office for policing and crime.

Johnson, as mayor of London, along with Kit Malthouse, his then deputy for policing, who is now the policing minister, vigorously promoted the intensive use of section 60 in parts of the capital from 2008 onwards as a means of tackling knife crime.

Marian Fitzgerald, a former principal researcher in the Home Office research and statistics directorate and now visiting professor of criminology at the University of Kent, said this did nothing to reduce knife crime and inflamed tensions between communities and the police.

“Far from reducing knife crime, the Johnson-Malthouse approach further entrenched a problem, which has become more intractable ever since,” she said. “In doing so, they were also replicating the conditions which gave rise to the riots which erupted in Brixton in 1981 and rapidly spread to other parts of the country.

“At their height in London, between 2008 and 2011, the proportion of section 60 searches which resulted in an arrest for carrying an offensive weapon of any sort was consistently less than 0.5%.”

Up to £2.5bn has been promised by Johnson to create 10,000 additional prison places.

But this is not a new initiative. A prison safety and reform white paper published in 2016 and the Conservative party manifesto for the 2017 snap election promised “to modernise the prison estate, replacing the most dilapidated prisons and creating 10,000 modern prison places”.

The Ministry of Justice said the “first new prison” would be built at HMP Full Sutton – but Full Sutton has been earmarked for expansion since 2017. The ministry has been seeking permission to expand the capacity to more than 1,400, but the proposals have been met with significant objections in the local area.

But even if the policy was new, it goes against the grain of evidence that suggests ex-home secretary Michael Howard’s “prisons works” mantra is flawed.

Peter Dawson, the director of the Prison Reform Trust, said: “Doing away with overcrowded and outdated prisons makes a lot of sense. But governments have been promising that for decades, and they always underestimate what’s involved.

“According to the prison service’s own figures, it would take 9,000 new spaces just to eliminate overcrowding – not a single dilapidated prison could be taken out of use before that figure was reached.”

Not only will more prison places be created under Johnson’s brand of justice, but prisoners could be locked up for longer too. Violent and sexual offenders will be the subject of a review of sentencing, as will the most prolific offenders. The general rule that a prisoner serving a fixed-term sentence is normally released automatically halfway through their sentence will be reviewed.

But Johnson is reportedly set to trash the work of former justice secretary David Gauke, who struck a refreshing tone in his approach to prison, welcomed across the criminal justice sector.

Gauke, who was praised by experts as taking a balanced and evidence-based approach, advocated moving away from ineffective short-term sentences, as figures show about two-thirds of offenders on prison terms of less than 12 months reoffend, compared with a third of those given a court order.

Christina Marriott, the chief executive of the Revolving Doors Agency charity, said: “Any review of sentencing should take a good, hard look at short-sighted short prison sentences.” She said a broad consensus among experts and practitioners was “bolstered by the government’s own data, which shows that short prison sentences drive up crime and make people less safe”.

The efficacy of Johnson’s policies will continue to be vigorously debated. But there seems to be greater agreement that this wave of populist, headline-grabbing tough-on-crime policies are further evidence that Johnson is simply gearing up to fight a general election.

Charlotte Pickles, director of the Reform thinktank, said: “Boris Johnson’s criminal justice reforms are a monumental waste of money. His proposed sentencing reforms ignore evidence that shows that longer prison sentences are ineffective at deterring crime or reducing reoffending.

“His unequivocal embrace of stop and search is dumbfounding – research shows it does little to prevent violence. Intelligent investment is clearly needed, but these pledges are costly election baubles, not a serious attempt to make this country safer.”