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Labour will on Friday outline plans to release thousands of prisoners earlier than planned in order to ease the jail capacity crisis, as the prime minister warned there were “simply not enough” prison spaces left.
Justice secretary Shabana Mahmood is set to say that the government will reduce the amount of time some non-violent offenders spend in jail from 50 per cent of their sentence to 40 per cent in an effort to free up capacity.
Mahmood will claim that, without the move, prisons will run out of places and the public could be put at risk from “unchecked criminality” on the streets because police will not have the cell capacity needed to arrest and process dangerous criminals.
The move had been intended to be introduced under the Conservatives but was pushed back due to the election.
One senior prison official said the situation was “vulnerable to shocks in estate”, including civil disorder and riots similar to those witnessed in 2011 when staff lost control of HMP Prison Ford in West Sussex.
“If nothing was done, I would be professionally very, very worried by the August Bank Holiday,” the official added.
Sir Keir Starmer on Thursday said that urgent action was required because prisons in England and Wales had been left to deteriorate under the previous government.
“This is a total failure of the last government . . . to have left a situation where there are simply not enough prison places for the number of prisoners,” Starmer told the BBC at a Nato summit in Washington.
He added that high-risk offenders would be excluded under any early release scheme.
Measures to release prisoners earlier than previously anticipated will help alleviate pressure in the system, but will generate a limited buffer and shift demand onto the probation service.
The male prison estate has about 700 free spaces and courts may grind to a halt alongside a suspension of arrests once jails are at capacity, according to one official. The situation has fluctuated in recent months and the number of available places has at times fallen below 500, placing severe pressures on the prison service.
The Prison Governors’ Association on Thursday said former prime minister Rishi Sunak had avoided making hard decisions in office despite advice from his own ministers.
“We hope that over the coming months that a significant reduction in the prison population will bring some much-needed stability across the system. Prisons need time to heal,” the PGA added.
The justice ministry, under the Conservatives, had been releasing some prisoners 70 days early on an ad hoc basis since October.
“We’ve got to pick it up. We’ve got to clean up the mess and then put in a plan for never being in this position,” Starmer said.
Former Tory justice secretary Alex Chalk earlier on Thursday warned that reducing the time served to 40 per cent would only buy the new government another 18 months before jails fill up again.
“[It] will buy you 18 months, but it won’t buy you any more than that,” he told the BBC. “You have to, as new justice secretary, be very frank and credible about the long term.”
Mark Day, deputy director of the Prison Reform Trust, a charity, said there was an “immediate crisis” in capacity that warranted emergency measures. “They have to take measures which substantially take pressure off,” he said.
But Day warned that in the long term Labour needed to address issues surrounding sentencing that had enabled the prison population to swell for several decades.
He noted the minimum tariff for serious offences including murder had “massively increased” alongside the use of indeterminate and extended sentences — a type of sentence that includes a spell in jail and extended period up to five years out on licence — to further strain services.
Any move to release prisoners early would require investment in probation services, he added.
While in opposition, Mahmood criticised the previous government’s Sentencing bill, which featured a presumption against short sentences, for not making provisions to handle people on licence once released into the community.
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