Post-riot communities face a difficult terrain ahead, but pushing the justice system beyond the tipping point is not the answer.

As I was watching my neighbourhood being torn up on Saturday night two weeks ago, my first instinct was to try and protect my own street and building, together with my shocked neighbours. The destruction in Tottenham was appalling, and a number of the buildings in the High Road which were destroyed by fire are still unsafe. The response of the community since then has been heartening - people helping each other, donating clothes, toys and hygiene items to the families made homeless by the devastation, supporting shopkeepers whose shops were destroyed, and participating in the communal clean up effort. We've had the prime minister, royalty and celebrities visit the neighbourhood. Ours is a loving and supportive community, and it takes more than something like the riots to bring us to our knees.

But the hope and inspiration which I experienced as a resident of Tottenham in our community bouncing back has been off-set by the heavy feeling of despondency resulting from observing what is happening in the criminal justice system.

When the first rioters began appearing in courts, myself and many other criminal justice professionals felt that the only appropriate response to those who attacked our (indeed their own communities) was a programme of restorative justice on an industrial scale. This would have allowed for proper reparation and reconciliation - the rioters being made to do hard physical work to repair the damage they did or in other parts of the community, to be made to apologise for their appalling actions to the victims and understand the harm they have caused the their lives, and for professionals and community members to engage in pro-social modelling. This kind of work cannot sit in isolation, it must happen against a backdrop of disrupting violence, addressing public health concerns such as addiction and creating alternatives to gang-style behaviour by reinforcing positive resilience factors. All of this is more effective and less costly than hyperincarceration - both in terms of hard evidence and in terms of communities dealing with and minimising the harm they suffer from crime.

What has happened instead has been quite different. We will see an influx of hundreds if not thousands of people into the prison system. Magistrates are remanding in custody 35 times more people than they would normally. In a prison system which is already overcrowded by over 10% above its official capacity[1] this will result in extreme overcrowding and all the threats to public health and public safety which come with it. Already we have heard reports of very serious assaults in custody involving new arrivals. We know that between a fifth and a quarter of all new heroin addictions are acquired in prison - so how many of these rioters will emerge with addictions and blood-borne viruses to spread to their communities? Cholera, TB, Hepatitis and HIV thrive in overcrowded conditions and have no respect for prison walls or barbed wire.

We also know that around ¾ of those implicated in the riots who are going through the court system have previous convictions (albeit not necessarily resulting in custodial terms) - what does this tell us about the success of resettlement the last time these people were in the criminal justice system? As for the conversation about the public's confidence in the system and its expectations of it to deliver a safer and more just society, with these events it has all but disappeared, although it is only a matter of time before the public starts to question how it serves the purposes of justice if someone gets a far more severe sentence for setting up a Facebook event compared to enacting a violent sexual assault or defrauding a large number of people of their livelihoods.

I fear that these events, which some claim to have foreseen and others are describing as a "black swan" (high impact but low probability) may be the tipping point for the penal system in England and the concerted efforts made over the last year by the government to halt hyperincarceration will be rolled back. A penal system cannot hope to rehabilitate effectively when three people are having to live in a cell designed for one. It is in no position to deliver effective programmes when staff are overstretched and budgets are cut by 20% when there are many more prisoners in the system than even a week ago. And the taxpayer should not be forced to cope with this increased but avoidable demand.

But the pendulum is forever swinging, from individual treatment to mass imprisonment, from treatment to infection, from rehabilitation to containment. And the job of civil society and practitioners now is to catch it before it swings too far. It will be much harder now than it would have been had a mass restorative programme applied to those going through the courts, even if custodial sentences are reduced or over-turned on appeal - communities will have to deal with large numbers of disconnected, potentially addicted and far more adept at criminality individuals returning to them. But this can be manageable - as long as the transition point is paid attention and each of these people is seen as an individual, not, as some commentators have contented, some kind of mindless criminal mass whose only motivation is to offend.

The pity is that for this work to be successful, practitioners and volunteers will have even more strain placed on their already highly pressurised working lives. The system is staffed with good, professional, dedicated people, to whom politicians and the media must listen and whom they must support, rather than criticise - and whose knowledge and experience is the main thing which gives us hope that our communities can remain safe as the pendulum continues to swing.