The announcement by the Justice Secretary, Shabana Mahmood, was today described as a missed opportunity.
Speaking earlier today at HMP Five Wells, the Justice Secretary announced plans for prisoners serving standard determinate sentences to be released after serving 40 per cent of their sentence. Currently, prisoners serve 50 per cent of their sentence in prison before being released.
This will mean that a prisoner serving a four-year prison sentence will be released about one month earlier than they otherwise would have been.
The changes, which could come into force in September, will require parliamentary approval.
Speaking today, the Director of the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies, Richard Garside, said:
This announcement was widely trailed and, given the capacity crisis faced by male prisons, the Justice Secretary had to do something, and quickly.
Having invoked the possible ‘collapse of the criminal justice system’ and ‘a total breakdown of law and order’ to justify the measures, what has been announced is pretty modest.
It is also symptomatic of the policy dysfunction at the heart of prison sentencing policy.
Successive governments and parliaments have created a prisons crisis: legislating for ever longer sentences and creating ever more hurdles for released prisoners, making it more likely that they end up back in prison.
In response, government ministers have been left coming up with creative solutions, such as today’s announcement, to ‘fix’ a problem created in Whitehall and Westminster.
Earlier this year, the recently-appointed prisons minister, James Timpson, said that only one third of those currently in prison needed to be there.
As for the nearly 3,000 prisoners serving IPP (Imprisonment for Public Protection) sentences, many of them languishing in prison years beyond the sentence of the court, today’s announcement does nothing for them.
Having bought itself some time in the short-term, the Ministry of Justice should develop a strategy to manage down the prison population over the medium- to long-term, allowing prisons to escape the permacrisis they are currently in.
Our reaction to the Justice Secretary’s announcement are referenced in this House of Commons library briefing.
