Around 700 Prisoners Released Early as Jails Hit 98% Capacity
The first tranche of the expanded early release scheme began this morning, with about 700 offenders leaving prison in England and Wales and a further 3,800 scheduled over the next year. Those serving up to nineteen months now go after a third of their sentence rather than 40%. Prisons are at 98% capacity, with 1,134 vacant beds left in the adult male estate. The Domestic Abuse Commissioner calls the scheme “shameful”.
The weak point is not the release decision but what happens after it. The government’s answer is tagging and new restriction zones, yet the probation inspectorate found this week that only 55% of tags were fitted on time, with one in ten offenders waiting five months. Hostel capacity is the second failure point: one probation source said “we have a handful of places for ex-offenders and they are full. We are now looking at releasing some people straight on to the street.” Napo’s national chair Ben Cockburn said the prison service is in “absolute denial” about a service with “massive staff shortages, unsustainable and dangerously high workloads”. The Justice Secretary Alex Norris said the government “would have liked to have gone further in terms of restricting” who qualifies. Dame Nicole Jacobs said she had “no assurance that the danger perpetrators pose has been properly considered and assessed with meaningful input from victims”. Watch the second tranche of 650 on 13 October, the day after the Commons returns.