Shortly before he became Prime Minister, Andy Burnham’s team spoke to The Sunday Times about the prisoner early release scheme.
Under the scheme, most prisoners serving fixed-length sentences were, from September, due to be released at the one third point of their sentence, down from the current 40 per cent point. With prisons due to run out of space later this year, the scheme was sold as a necessary step to prevent prisons, and by extension the entire justice system, from seizing up.
Burnham was “understood to be alarmed”, his team told the newspaper on 4 July, by some aspect of the plans, “under which child groomers and rapists could be among more than 5,000 prisoners eligible for early release”.
A few days later, the Conservative opposition initiated a parliamentary debate, which called on the Government “to exempt from automatic early release… any offender who has been convicted of a sexual offence against an adult or a child, including rape and grooming, or convicted of the attempt, conspiracy, or incitement to commit such offences”.
Few Labour MPs spoke in support of the early release scheme; a number spoke against it. When Burnham became Prime Minister a few weeks later, he quickly paused the early release scheme “until we have conducted an urgent review and done everything we can to minimise risk to the public”.
For me, one of the most interesting interventions in the debate came from the Liberal Democrat MP, Jess Brown-Fuller. “When a sentence is handed down,” she said, “victims deserve the certainty of knowing where they stand and how long their perpetrator will remain behind bars”.
New laws and sentences, she added, are not applied retrospectively. “The same should apply to sentencing after the fact”.
Another MP, the Conservative John Cooper, argued that the wool was being pulled over the public’s eyes, “because what may sound like a hefty sentence is automatically subject to a craven rolling back or to early release”.
These are versions of the so-called ‘truth in sentencing’ argument, which, at its most uncompromising, would hold that a person sentenced, say, to six years should serve all six of those years in prison before being released.
In practice, prisoners on fixed sentences serve some of their prison sentence under post-release supervision in the community, rather than all of it in a cell. And while there are good resettlement and rehabilitation arguments for doing this, it does become a more difficult sell when only a minority of a prison sentence is actually served in prison.
Successive governments and parliaments have driven up sentence lengths through legislation over many years, contributing to the prison capacity crisis we currently have. Successive governments and parliaments have then sought to undo, administratively, the effects of this legislation through early release schemes.
Something will eventually have to give. The declared sentences, for a whole range of offences, are far too long. Addressing this through ad hoc administrative measures is no way to run a justice system.
What should not survive indefinitely is the current arrangement, in which Parliament promises punishment that cannot be delivered, and the gap is closed administratively, out of sight, until a letter lands on a victim’s doormat.
Truth in sentencing need not mean every day served behind bars. But it ought at least to mean that the sentence announced in court is proportionate, and bears a stable, knowable relationship to the sentence actually served.
