The first wave of early prisoner releases began on Thursday, with 700 criminals expected to be freed across the country. One prisoner, dressed in shorts, a T-shirt and trainers and holding his belongings in a bin bag, said to the press as he left HMP Durham in north-east England: “Justice system, what justice system? Thank you Andy Burnham.”
Reactions from released inmates
Another prisoner gave a thumbs-up to cameras as he walked away. A man leaving HMP Cardiff, who was asked if he had a message for the Prime Minister, said: “Thank you very much and don’t get me back here again, bro.”
The inmates are among thousands the Government says it has been forced to let out to free up space in overcrowded jails and stop the justice system from collapsing. Former prime minister Sir Keir Starmer and previous Tory administrations had presided over similar plans.
Scope of the release scheme
Some 5,000 prisoners are scheduled to be released in stages over the next year, down from 6,000 after ministers intervened to exclude rapists and the most serious child sex offenders in the wake of the policy dominating the headlines over the summer. Prisoners guilty of manslaughter will also be excluded, meaning the killers of Pc Andrew Harper, who died in the line of duty in 2019, will not be eligible.
The number of people behind bars has jumped by more than 1,700 in the past three months. The prison population in England and Wales was 87,499 on Monday, according to Ministry of Justice (MoJ) data. This is up from 85,761 on June 29 – a rise of 1,738, or 2%.
Official responses and concerns
The MoJ said released offenders will be monitored under the “toughest supervision in British history”. Conservative shadow justice secretary Nick Timothy said the public would “pay the price” for the decision and the policy was an “insult to victims”. Victims commissioner Claire Waxman warned the Government’s confidence in the plan “is not yet matched by the reality on the ground”.
Labour MP for Derby North Catherine Atkinson, chairwoman of the Commons Justice Committee, said the releases were “regretfully a matter of necessity after more than a decade of policy failure to manage the estate’s long-running capacity issues”. The safety of victims and the public “must be paramount”, she said, adding: “Serious questions remain over the pressures on probation and prison staff, the effectiveness of electronic monitoring, as well as the system’s readiness to manage the return of offenders back into communities in the coming months.”
Justice Secretary Alex Norris said: “We understand the anxiety victims face ahead of offenders’ release dates, but the greatest danger to victims would be prisons running out of cells for dangerous criminals, which was the crisis this Government inherited. Our plan will make sure this never happens again by building 14,000 prison places while subjecting offenders to the toughest-ever controls, leaving them nowhere to hide and under no doubt that we are watching them.”
The move coincides with the Justice Secretary being sworn in as Lord Chancellor at a ceremony at the Royal Courts of Justice in central London on the first day of the new legal year, where he vowed to the most senior judges in England and Wales that he would be “ambitious” in his bid to cut the courts backlog of cases.
