(Bloomberg) -- The UK’s new government said it will release low-risk prisoners after they’ve served 40% of their sentences — compared with 50% currently — as part of a bid to address an overcrowding crisis in the country’s jails.
Justice Secretary Shabana Mahmood said a failure to act would risk “total breakdown of law and order” with prison officers unable to keep control, as she blamed the outgoing Conservative administration for leaving the prison estate “on the point of collapse.” Action was needed to stop police cells filling up, delays to court cases and the inability to arrest dangerous criminals, she said.
“I do not choose to do this because I want to,” Mahmood said in a speech. “The measures I have set out are not a silver bullet. But they will give us the time we need to address the prisons crisis, not just today but for years to come.”
Prime Minister Keir Starmer has said addressing the prisons crisis is his main domestic priority since his Labour Party swept to power at the general election last week. Jails have been close to capacity for over a decade but Starmer said the situation was worse than he’d anticipated. He criticized the “terrible state” of public services left by the Tories when he spoke to reporters this week.
Yet Friday’s decision is politically sensitive for Starmer, even though there’s only a marginal difference to what the Tories were already doing. Voters overwhelmingly support longer prison sentences, and the right-leaning press tends to attack any measures seen as watering down punishment.
Over two-thirds of Britons think current criminal punishments are too lenient, according to polling for the Parliamentary Justice Committee last year, compared to just 4% who say they are too tough.
The new government has been forced to act because the country’s prisons are at 99% capacity, due to years of underfunding and increasing sentence lengths.
The number of prisoners has doubled since the 1990s, rising quickly under the governments of John Major and Tony Blair, and remaining at that level under the Conservatives from 2010, with only a temporary dip during the Covid-19 pandemic. England and Wales now have the highest imprisonment rate in Western Europe, according to the Prison Reform Trust.
It’s a long-running issue which some Conservatives tried but failed to address. Former Justice Secretary Alex Chalk tried to release some prisoners early before this month’s election, but his proposals were rejected by ex-premier Rishi Sunak. In 2019, proposals put forward by then Justice Secretary David Gauke to abolish prison sentences shorter than six months were ditched.
In Labour’s plan, serious violent offenses are excluded from the early release scheme, as are domestic abuse crimes. Mahmood said the aim was to buy time and that Labour would continue the government’s prison building program.
“This is not a permanent change,” she said. “I am unapologetic in my belief that criminals must be punished.”
Mahmood also set out plans to recruit over 1,000 trainee probation officers by March 2025, to try to reduce recidivism. “Only by driving down reoffending will we ever find a sustainable solution to the prisons crisis,” she said.
Her intervention follows Starmer’s appointment of businessman James Timpson as his minister for prisons, parole and probation.
Timpson, whose key-cutting business is known for hiring former prisoners, has previously said Britain is “addicted” to sending people to prison and suggested that only one third of prisoners should be there. Starmer has praised Timpson’s “huge experience” and said tackling recidivism would be a key goal given data show that a quarter of prisoners re-offend within a year of their release.
--With assistance from Isabella Ward.
©2024 Bloomberg L.P.
