In a move aimed at tackling prison overcrowding, Keir Starmer is set to sanction emergency measures that will release criminals from prison before they’ve served half their sentences. The Times has the story.
There are fewer than 700 spaces left in men’s jails in England and Wales, the Times has been told, before a critical week in the prisons overcrowding crisis.
A Ministry of Justice (MoJ) source said “the immediate crisis is quite severe” after the General Election stalled its ability to free up more space over the past six weeks.
Shabana Mahmood, the new Justice Secretary, has been presented with a list of immediate and medium-term options to ease pressure on prisons and to ensure the most dangerous criminals are locked up. …
At the top of the list of options presented to Mahmood over the weekend is lowering the automatic release point for prisoners to less than 50% through their sentence. Multiple Government sources said that this measure is almost certain to be taken by the end of this week, following authorisation from the Prime Minister.
At present offenders serving standard determinate sentences are released at the halfway point, with exclusions for prisoners jailed for sexual, violent or terror-related offences. They serve the rest of their sentence on licence, meaning they can be recalled to prison within that period.
Under the emergency measure, the automatic release point would be reduced to as low as 40% for offenders serving sentences of less than four years, according to sources familiar with the plans. It would be the first time in British history that prisoners are automatically released less than halfway through their sentence. …
An estimated 40,000 inmates would benefit, according to analysis of MoJ figures. …
Mahmood is also understood to have been presented with more drastic civil contingency measures that could be enacted if other options fail to alleviate the crisis.
This includes a proposal that would cancel the sentence of low-level offenders immediately on release, meaning they could not be recalled to prison for breaching licence conditions.
Worth reading in full.
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I wonder how they classify a “violent” offence. Aren’t most offences violent? Certainly a lot. Are there really tens of thousands of people in prison for “non-violent” crimes? I thought you had to try pretty hard to get sent to prison unless you put stickers up about defending your country from invaders.
Yes Clown World logic dictates that the only way to get those ever-increasing crime stats moving in the other direction is by providing a deterrent, such as described above, whilst simultaneously releasing already convicted crims onto the streets before they’ve even completed their already pitiful sentences. Sounds like a plan to me. Let’s revisit those same stats in, say, 6 months time, in order to see how effective this is in the real world.
I agree with Peter Hitchens that prisons are unpleasant in the wrong way – they should be austere but not dangerous to be in. But it seems to me that prison works in so far as while people are in prison they cannot commit further crimes. We also like to import some cultures and races that seem more disposed to committing crimes on average than the natives – but then I am a horrid racist!
We were burgled 5 times in London and then it stopped. We came to understand that those responsible had been caught and imprisoned. We stopped having our home invaded.
Indeed. Home invasion. Burglary is a violent crime.
Yes. Let’s look for the change in the trends.
Most certainly Sir Keir will bring in a change in the way figures are recorded which will make comparisons difficult.
His empty election slogan was ‘Change’ – he didn’t specify the direction of the change. Caveat emptor
I wonder how they classify a “violent” offence.
Carrying a 3.1″ knife in your pocket during a solitary walk would be my guess. As I know from practical experiences, slamming someone into a door (outcome: bruised shoulder) and threatening to knife him, followed by robbing of £30 isn’t even an offence, let alone a violent one. I still regularly meet this guy but he hasn’t tried this again. I admit I slammed him into the door as well, which was technically stupid because this enabled him to get my purse. But I hope it helped.
If you are a right winger then almost everything you do constitutes violence using the liberal left lexicon of anti-hate speech.
This is on the Tories.
Absolutely, almost everything is now. 14 years would have been ample time for even a moderately right wing pro-liberty party to make massive improvements for the better.
Piece here, which I’ve plugged before.
https://conservativehome.com/2024/07/05/requiem-for-the-lotus-eaters/
Quote on prisons:
Perhaps the most telling explanation for why Rishi Sunak made his bizarre decision to call the snap election now is the prisons crisis, and few issues better encapsulate how we have set and primed this political timebomb over the past 14 years.
Since 2010 we have closed 17 prisons. Four of these are currently tourist attractions, as prisons. One of those, HMP Lancaster, was at the time of closure the second-best performing prison, in terms of recidivism rates, in the entire country. It was shut for no better reason than that Ken Clarke had wanted to close it in the 1990s, and didn’t think it appropriate to have a jail in a castle.
This programme has been pursued despite the abject failure to build even replacements for the cells we were shutting. The scale of the failure of the prisons programme actually boggles the mind:
“A 2015 commitment to invest “£1.3 billion to create 10,000 new prison places by 2020” has, according to the Public Accounts Committee, produced just 206 (with 3,500 on the way in some form).”
Why was it so difficult? You guessed it: chronic refusal to bulldoze new jails through our insane planning system, and even the sternest of law-and-order Tory MPs shouting their heads off if ever it was proposed to open a new one in their constituency.
It’s the same everywhere. Why do we have endless stories about putting asylum seekers in hotels? The failure to build a purpose-built asylum estate. London swiftly becoming a Tory-free zone, and radiating angry voters out into the Home Counties? Fourteen years failing to force through new housing in the capital (take a bow, Iain Duncan Smith and Theresa Villiers).
A 2015 commitment to invest “£1.3 billion to create 10,000 new prison places by 2020″
Is £130,000 per prisoner. More expensive than a two bedroom flat.
That’s only a fraction of the foreign aid budget but, we always seem to find the money for that!
The Civil Service ‘advise’ all ministers.
Let in a million or more men that are the polar opposite of the culture here and without restriction. People and drug trafficking along with peripheral crimes have increased including rape. Solution – release 40,000 prisoners early.
No, no. He won’t let them out early. He’ll simply change the definition of what proportion of the sentence is to be served inside.
That’s what the people voted for isn’t it? Change.
Possibly short change.
Provided they double (or better yet, triple) the sentences, crack on. I’m all for it.
How many prisoners are TV License offenders, I wonder?
Fair point. Also some people have gone to prison for contravening DEI rules.
Cancel all foreign aid and use the money to build capacity into the prison system, How’s that for a rad idea?
“ensure only the most dangerous criminals remain locked up. …”
Those being baby eating psychopaths!..
everyone else is free to leave..move along promptly now, don’t let the prison door hit you on the ar$e!
If people are committing more crime then we need more prisons NOT letting them out early.
It’s meant to be a deterrent and rehabilitation to stop reoffending.
This is the type of thinking that will see people beating up your mother and not even going to prison in the first place. The Progressives will have their usual bunch of mamby pamby excuses (1) prison doesn’t work (2) We need to educate criminals (3) It is society itself that created the criminals so we must change society.—- etc etc. Punishment and Discipline are dirty words to Progressives.
The best way of keeping the country safe is to put criminals in jail for a long time, with repeat offenders staying in for significantly longer, and to catch them early. No short sentences for young offenders of violent crimes.
There is of course a fairly traditional way of reducing the number of prisoners that are in for murder where there is no doubt whatsoever of guilt.
Its all those postmasters clogging up the system!
Oh, the irony!
Clamouring to lock up innocent civilians.
Clamouring to release convicted criminals.
Cognitive dissonance
So basically, people who have committed 40+ burglaries and – eventually – after several court appearances and “warnings” were sent to prison will now be released to start their chosen “profession” again.
And many more victims.
Genius.
Presumably this will include ‘plea-bargain’ prisoners, where a sentence of four years should probably have been a 10-year stretch.