Labour was accused of taking a “dangerous gamble with public safety” yesterday as the Government unveiled plans to release thousands of prisoners early. The Mail has more.
Justice Secretary Shabana Mahmood announced a series of measures designed to ease overcrowding in jails and avert a “total breakdown of law and order”.
Offenders will be automatically freed after serving 40% of their sentence, rather than the current 50%.
She stressed the rule would not apply to violent offenders serving more than four years, sex offenders or those in prison for crimes connected to domestic abuse. Dangerous offenders serving extended or life sentences would also be exempted from the scheme.
But Keir Starmer’s new Justice Minister Lord Timpson fuelled fury at the “anti-prison” approach as he suggested that courts should be handing out shorter sentences in the first place.
The peer, a long-time campaigner for reform who has argued that two-thirds of inmates should not be in prison at all, said the authorities should be “less focused on the length of a sentence” and more focused on rehabilitation.
The aunt of Zara Aleena, who was murdered by a man who had been out on licence for nine days, raised concerns that Labour was “gambling with public safety” and convicts will not be “supervised adequately”.
In a speech at HMP Five Wells, in Northamptonshire, Ms. Mahmood said prisons were “on the point of collapse”, with barely 700 places left in the adult male estate and jails operating at 99% capacity since the start of 2023.
If prisons ran out of cell space, she warned, the country faced the prospect of “van-loads of dangerous people circling the country with nowhere to go”, police officers unable to arrest criminals and “looters running amok”.
She said: “In short, if we fail to act now, we face the collapse of the criminal justice system and a total breakdown of law and order.”
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