While prisoner escapes from London hospitals grab front pages and child abuse cases grow more complex, there's a quieter story buried in Ministry of Justice data: the money actually reaching crime victims has collapsed.

In 2016, courts ordered criminals to pay an average of just £200 in compensation to their victims. The year before, that figure was £259. A 23% drop in twelve months — the kind of cut that would spark outrage if it hit any other public service (Source: Ministry of Justice, Criminal Justice Statistics Quarterly -- Outcomes-by-Offence-data-tool-2010-2016 -- 3. Compensation).

This isn't about inflation eating away at fixed amounts. These are real compensation orders, made by real judges, for real crimes. Yet somehow, in a year when politicians were promising to get tougher on crime, victims were getting less money from those who hurt them.

The timing matters. 2016 was when austerity was biting hardest into criminal justice budgets. Court closures accelerated. Legal aid shrank. Probation services were part-privatised. And somewhere in that squeeze, victim compensation — never the headline-grabbing part of sentencing — got quietly crushed.

Think about what £200 actually covers. A stolen phone costs more than that. Professional therapy for trauma? Forget it. Even replacing a broken window after a burglary would eat through most of it. The average compensation order now covers less than a week's minimum wage work.

This isn't just about money — it's about what the system values. When a prisoner escapes twice in a week, it triggers investigations, reviews, parliamentary questions. When compensation drops by nearly a quarter, it barely registers. The spectacle gets attention. The substance gets ignored.

The pattern reveals itself across criminal justice data. Resources flow towards the dramatic — the escapes, the manhunts, the emergency responses. Meanwhile, the unglamorous work of actually helping victims recover gets starved of both funding and attention.

For victims of crime, this data tells a simple story: you matter less now than you did the year before. Not in speeches or policy documents, but in the only currency that actually helps people rebuild their lives after crime. And that decline happened while politicians were loudly promising the opposite.

The prisoner who escaped twice this week will cost thousands in police time, hospital security reviews, and media attention. The victim getting £58 less compensation than last year's victim? That's not news. But it should be.