It wasn’t the most dramatic picture, but it told a story. A man, convicted for kidnap and grievous bodily harm and jailed for seven years, celebrating with a thumbs-up hand gesture as he was released from HMP Swaleside on the Isle of Sheppey, seven weeks early. It was one of dozens of images snapped around the country earlier this week, as the second round of the emergency early-release scheme, green-lit by justice secretary Shabana Mahmood, kicked into gear, freeing 1,100 prisoners earlier than expected to avert an overcrowding crisis.
The previous evening I had been a stone’s throw across the water from Sheppey, home to no less than three prisons, in a pub in Sittingbourne, observing a focus group of swing voters. Needless to say, the group were not reassured at the thought of prisoners being let out early. “It’s just a joke – because what deterrent is there?” was one man’s blunt assessment. Another felt it was unfair to blame the new Labour government for a problem that had clearly been years in the making, recognising that “you can’t build a prison overnight”, while a woman worried about the shortage of prison guards with such a high number of inmates: “You can build as many prisons as you want, but you don’t have the staff to staff it”.
The prisons crisis is a microcosm of the wider breakdown of the public realm. Steadily rising sentences combined with a refusal, during the Conservatives’ 14 years in power, to build more prisons or invest in the existing prisons estate have led to dangerous overcrowding. Over the August Bank Holiday weekend it was reported that just 100 places in male prisons remained across England and Wales. The shortage of places and the looming need to release the pressure with an early-release scheme for prisoners who had served 40 rather than 50 per cent of their sentences, however controversial it proved with the public, is one of the main reasons Rishi Sunak decided to call an election in July rather than November. Almost exactly a year ago, judges were told to delay sentencing criminals because prisons were on the brink of full capacity.
Overcrowding is dangerous in that it prevents individuals who pose a risk to the public from being put behind bars, but also because of what worsening conditions inside mean for staff an inmates alike. A former Ministry of Justice official told me a few months ago that they were surprised there had not yet been another riot like the devastating scenes at HMP Birmingham in 2016 when inmates took over the prison. More than that – they were surprised there had not yet been a beheading.
All of this is the rather alarming context for the early-release scheme, which Sunak’s justice secretary, Alex Chalk, admitted in July had been considered by the Tories earlier in the year. It is very much a problem inherited from the Tories – as Keir Starmer put it on his second day as prime minister (in a line echoed this week by the Sittingbourne focus group participant), “I can’t build a prison overnight”.
But there is another way of looking at this challenge. On Tuesday, former Conservative justice secretary and esteemed New Statesman columnist David Gauke was appointed by Mahmood to chair an independent review of sentencing policing. Writing on his appointment, Gauke concluded: “For the last 30 years, there has been a sentencing bidding war between the political parties seeking to compete to be seen as the toughest on crime by promising ever-longer prison sentences.”
As Gauke notes, the prison population of England and Wales has doubled since 1993. Successive justice secretaries from Labour and the Conservatives have privately acknowledged the counter-productive absurdity of Britain’s ever-lengthening sentences, even if they do not feel able discuss it publicly while in office. When I spoke to journalist and prisons campaigner (and former inmate of HMP Wandsworth) Chris Atkins last year, he was scathing about both parties’ attempts to look “tough” on criminals even if the data on reducing crime told a different story. “It’s just playground, it’s adolescent, it’s pathetic. It’s ‘my dad’s harder than your dad’,” he told me. Britain has the highest incarceration rate in western Europe – do we believe our population is inherently more criminal in nature than, for example, the French or the Germans?
The idea that we should imprison fewer people – perhaps even doing away with short sentences altogether (six to 12 months inside is enough time for someone to lose their job and disrupt any housing or familial stability they might have, without being long enough for any attempt at rehabilitation) – is a tough sell for the law-and-order loving British public. The people in the Sittingbourne focus group, on the doorstep of three prisons, were quite rightly concerned about deterrents and how early-release would be interpreted by criminals. There is a reason Sunak didn’t want photos of inmates celebrating outside prisons on his watch: politicians are wary of sending the wrong message, especially in the context of other justice breakdowns like the lack of police resources to tackle crimes like burglary and the scandalous multi-year delays for trials.
But the change of government combined with widespread awareness (finally) that the system is at breaking point presents a unique opportunity for a radical, cross-party attempt at doing something different. Gauke’s role chairing the sentencing review sends its own message: this isn’t about one party or another being soft on crime, but acknowledging that longer sentences don’t necessarily keep the public any safer, and there may be ways to invest resources that are more effective at both reducing crime and rehabilitating offenders than spending £52,000 per year per prisoner locking them up in overcrowded estates. For example, as Atkins points out, “If we solved reoffending, we’d prevent 80 per cent of all crimes.”
A year ago, Chalk was bigging up “Texas-style justice” – the US state has cut its prison population by using community service and probation instead of shorter sentences, while enabling inmates sentenced for longer periods to earn reductions in their jail time by engaging in rehabilitation courses. Now the Labour government is doing the same: Mahmood is understood to be looking closely at Texas’s example. Cross-party initiatives often run into trouble when the politics starts to get toxic, but there are tentative signs both parties understand the stakes here. And after two rounds of emergency early release, maybe the public is starting to, too.
This piece first appeared in the Morning Call newsletter; receive it every morning by subscribing on Substack here
