Prisons are full - who should be released early?

0:00This is The Guardian.

0:09Today, our prisons are full, but who should we release early to make space?

0:24At the last count, just two weeks ago, there were almost 86 ,500 people in prison in England and Wales. That is about 5 ,000 more than even the Ministry of Justice accepts can be held safely on the prison estate. It's not exactly a news story. Prisons have been full for years now. They were full when David Cameron was Prime Minister. The truth is that simply warehousing ever more prisoners is not financially sustainable. They were full under Boris Johnson. So we're going to have another 10 ,000 places. Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak. It does not apply to anyone serving a life sentence. Anyone convicted of a serious...

1:01And when Keir Starmer became Prime Minister, he inherited a system about to collapse, unless he carried on with Tory plans to release a bunch of prisoners early. We're releasing prisoners who should be in prison early and giving instructions to the police not to arrest in certain cases. That is how broken the system is. But that was only a temporary fix. And before he stepped down, Starmer pushed through a new law which would see 5 ,000 prisoners released early, from 1 September. Killers, rapists and sex offenders could be among those leaving prison sooner than expected, with some to be released after serving just a third of their sentence.

1:38When Andy Burnham arrived in number 10 last month, the thorny problem of early release was top of his intray. He has vowed to use his power to block certain criminals from leaving prison early, and has postponed early release until October. And I hope we can get to a position where people who have committed the serious crimes are not in the position where they are being released early. And that would include the killers of PC, Andrew Harper. That is my intention. I believe we can do it.

2:14But why are our prisons so full? And what can be done to free up space? From The Guardian, I'm Helen Pidd. Today in Focus, the impossible dilemma of early release.

2:30Judith Feline, you worked in various prisons and ended up being the governor of HMP Maidstone, which is one of the three jails in England and Wales that specialises in housing foreign national prisoners, one of the cohorts likely to be targeted in the latest drive to cut prison numbers. And we're going to talk about that in detail in a bit. But tell me, when you left the prison service in 2022, the situation was pretty similar to how it is now, very, very overcrowded. Can you talk us through what does overcrowding look like in practical terms in prison? I think it's a lot worse now than when I left.

3:02and one of the big problems is that a prison is built for a certain number of prisoners say 600 for the sake of argument that means you've got enough education places for 600 men the gym is designed for 600 men the multi-faith space is designed for that number of men so once you start overcrowding then you haven't got that much space because you're not going to get more classrooms you're not going to get a bigger gym you're not going to get more teachers or workshop instructors. So the big problem is that the more overcrowded you get, the more time prisoners are spending in their cells, which of course means we're not working with them to give them new skills, to give them better experiences when they're released.

3:40And I think it just becomes a vicious circle. Yeah. And was Maidstone Prison overcrowded when you left or were you just about managing at that point? We weren't at that point. One of the last phone calls I took was from headquarters asking me how many extra spaces I could make. And I said none, which wasn't the answer they wanted, but I thought it would be indecent. And you can't release people from prison if you haven't treated them decently. They're not going to become more decent people if you don't treat them decently in prison. Talk me through the process of getting ready to release a prisoner and then right up to release date.

4:16Okay, so there's lots of work. The trouble with early releases is that the timeframe for prisons to do this process will be constricted because they were being expected to release people in a few months' time and they're bringing it forward. So there is a danger that these processes don't get carried through properly. So there's what's called an offender management unit in every prison. They will check the sentence calculation. Probation officers or offender managers, depending upon the individual, should be looking for accommodation if they haven't got family to go back to. They should be talking to the prisoner about whether they can get a job.

4:51And there are various organisations that help in this process, whether they will need drug rehabilitation on the outside whether they will need to pick up prescriptions if they're being released and they're on meds that they've got a prescription ready to go out with them so it's a long process the prisoner needs to gather all his possessions so all of that goes on and and the prisoner will be getting bouncy and excited about being released yeah and I guess the stereotype of a prisoner is somebody counting down the hours the days the weeks until they're released. In your experience, is that something that most prisoners are really, really focused on when they're going to get out?

5:30It's a real mixture because the people who've got something to go out to are really excited about it. And you'll often see families waiting at the gate. And there's nothing nicer than seeing a dad running out to see his kids who are waiting for him to come out of prison. That's a special moment for the family. But there are other prisoners who've got nowhere to go. They might not have any accommodations. They might have broken up with their family in the time they've been in prison. That happens. For them, being released is a lot less exciting. I was working in a local prison and I saw somebody.

6:05We had to manhandle them out of the prison because they did not want to leave. Oh, goodness. Because life was better in prison with three meals a day and a roof over their head than it was on the streets. And they committed a crime before the end of the day and they were back in custody. Because for them, that was the safest place to be. And I think that's really sad.

6:37Peter Walker, welcome back to Today in Focus. Hi, hello. So you, of course, are our senior political correspondent and have been closely watching the first month of the Andy Burnham premiership. Oh, yes. Would you say that this growing row over early release is really the first tricky issue these had to face in office? I think it slightly is. I mean, it was one that was already there. You know, he knew that this was going to be coming at him. And there's an argument that it remains to be seen how well he's handled it. He shows he's willing to take action over this. You know, we were kind of half joking in the office yesterday that under the Keir Starmer government, they'd have said nothing until mid-October and then suddenly changed their mind.

7:20I've heard the depth of concern felt across the country about the potential release of the killers of PC Andrew Harper. And obviously, I feel... I thought that the interview he did on Tuesday, where he's basically saying, look, I understand the strength of feeling about this. I'm going to do what I can. Shows a politician who's listening, who's kind of on his toes. I mean, whether or not he can actually do something about it It's a different matter. Yeah, and we're going to come on to talk about what exactly might be on the table in terms of changing the plans for early release. And take us back, because this is not a new issue, is it?

7:57Where did this idea of early release come from and what prompted it? Well, we've already been here before. In the early weeks of Keir Starmer's time in power in 2024, there was a sudden release of prisoners from jails in England and Wales, basically because the Conservatives very openly left them completely full. We were at a stage where police chiefs were warning that before too long they wouldn't actually be able to arrest anyone because there'd be nowhere to put them. And Sunat basically said, you know, if there's an election coming, it's going to look bad if we release people. We'll leave it for the next lot.

8:29So there was already an early release of prisoners in 2024, which caused some bad publicity. Horrible pictures of people being let out in Gucci trainers, as getting in supercars, drinking champagne. Yes. I remember the pictures, the pictures of people getting picked up by, somebody getting picked up by a Lamborghini or some other sports car. And everyone going, thank you, Keir Starmer. Yeah, yeah, yeah. An early out for some at HMP Brixton in South London this morning. Time off their sentence. Part of the government's controversial early release scheme. Everyone's happy that they're going home, do you know what I mean?

9:04If you get any, even a day is good for some people, do you know what I mean? But I think they accepted there was nothing that could have been done because the alternative of basically having people either not being able to be arrested or riots in prisons or tend to a cell simply wouldn't work. This is a slightly more longer term thing. And why are our prisons so overcrowded? I mean, in brief, because we're sending more people to prison and for longer periods, more people are being jailed. There's been sentence inflation over the last few decades. rates. And because of the re-offending rates, a lot more people are being recalled to jail.

9:40I mean, the other thing to point out as well is that a lot of prisoners are in prison because they've been charged for a serious crime and they're waiting for their court date. And the delays in the Crown Court systems mean they might be a remand prisoner for several years. And so what exactly had Starmer's new law proposed in terms of who is eligible for early release and how soon they can get out of jail? Keir Starmer's government passed a new sentencing bill which basically said to free up people in prisons there's going to be this change whereby a lot of categories of prisoners will get out after 50 % rather than two-thirds.

10:15Right and that cohort of prisoners are the ones who've been convicted of violent or sexual crimes largely but it's also the case isn't it that an even bigger number of prisoners who have been convicted of lesser crimes will be released after serving just a third of their sentence so not even a half. I mean this This is an interesting thing because there's been less of a fuss made about the non-violent offenders getting out early. The understandable kind of flurry of publicity and media coverage has been about very serious offenders. And Andy Burnham has already changed the Keir Starmer plan that he said a few weeks back that he was going to delay the imminent release of prisoners.

10:53It was due to start in September. Hi everyone, nice to see you. Andy Burnham on his fourth day as Prime Minister has announced he is pausing that scheme and said no prisoner will be let out until he's convinced risks are minimised. And that serious sexual offenders, people connected to grooming gangs and other things like that, they were not going to get out. But the key issue which has kind of bitten him slightly is the fact that people convicted of manslaughter would still be eligible for this, partly because there's quite a lot of people who would fall under that category and they need to free up the prison spaces.

11:30Seven years after the killing of her son, PC Harper's mother says justice has not been served. I think I'm more angry than ever. I was already upset, but I feel it more now because I just feel like I'm going around in circles. And Andrew deserves more than this. And most notorious of all in the current news cycle are two of the people who were convicted of the manslaughter of PC Andrew Harper. He was killed in 2019 when he was called to a quad bike theft in Berkshire. It was a terrible death. He got caught in the strap that was attached to the back of the car as the offenders sped away and he was dragged down a country lane.

12:10So it's probably worth saying that the person who was convicted, the driver of the car, the main offender there was not eligible for the early release, but his accomplices would potentially have been released. Is that right? Yes, it is. They would be due for release in January. And it's been the kind of focus of this ever since. And there's been this problem that it's very, very difficult to change this because number 10 have been told that if you change it so manslaughter sentences are not covered by it, if they're also taken out of it, then potentially you're not going to be releasing enough people to free up the prison spaces.

12:46But you can't just, you know, do a thing like you can't change a law to say just these two people can't get out. So they've had to find this third route, which is what Andy Burnham and Lance done on Tuesday, which is to basically try and free up more prison spaces by different means. The proposal will be to find new ways of freeing up space within the prison system. And that plan will include issues like returning more foreign national offenders to their country of origin.

13:27Judith, one of the proposed solutions to freeing up prison space is to speed up the deportation of foreign criminals. and there were just over 10 ,000 foreign nationals being held in prisons in England and Wales at the end of June, according to the most recent figures from the Ministry of Justice. How easy, though, will it actually be to speed up their deportation? It's a difficult question. So, as you said, there's three foreign national prisons. So the three of us just held foreign nationals. But, of course, we didn't hold 6 ,000 between us. So there's a lot of foreign nationals in other prisons as well.

13:58The advantage of the three foreign national prisons is that we had home office teams of enforcement, immigration officers embedded within us. So there was a group of prisoners that were happy to go home and that was easy. They could facilitate that. The difficulty is the prisoners who don't want to go. Some of them have been here a long time. They've got families. They've got kids. They don't want to leave. And there's appeal processes. There's all sorts of ways in which the process grinds along very slowly. I was frustrated by quite a lot of that, partly because the Home Office seemed very happy to send people home who had kids here saying, well, you can FaceTime them.

14:36And for me, that's not the right answer. But more than that, people who need to go home, there's so many ways in which they can slow the process down and not cooperate. It's not an easy task. I don't know how it could be speeded up unless you take out some of the appeals processes, but that doesn't feel like something we would be happy to do. Yeah. And roughly what percentage of the foreign prisoners that you interacted with were happy to go home versus those who desperately wanted to stay? I'd say it was less than half who wanted to go. There was a bit of an incentive to go home in that they were released a little bit earlier.

15:14So there was an incentive which helped and some people were prepared to take that. I remember one young man, I can't remember what country he was from, but he'd come here when he was a toddler. So he didn't know his home country. He had no family or way of life out there, but his parents hadn't done the paperwork to get him to be a British citizen when he was a child. And we were keen to deport him. I felt so sad for him because it's one thing being sent somewhere if you've come over here from a country and you understand it and maybe you've still got some family out there you know you can make a life for yourself but to be sent somewhere where you know nothing and know nobody that felt really hard perhaps I'm too soft and and you know you talked a bit about the the preparation work which is ideally done to prepare somebody to be released into the outside world if this early release scheme goes ahead.

16:13We're going to have really large numbers of prisoners released early. Do you think they're going to be ready, like rehabilitated enough? This is what really bothers me about the system at the moment because prisons are overcrowded so there will be less rehabilitation being done because there's not more staff. So those people who should be doing that preparation for release will be spread more thinly and they will have had less chance to go to education classes, less chances to learn new skills. So we're releasing people who I think are probably more likely to re-offend. And we've seen people released early before and the recall rates back to prison have increased.

16:51So there is some suggestion that that is what happens. I think it would be much better off if we focused on improving the rehabilitation when people are in prison. And then hopefully we'd release people who would be better equipped to stay out of prison in the future. And also women's jails too. You're looking at those two in this plan, are you? Yes, we're going to look at all of those aspects alongside other measures. And another proposal that's being floated in terms of getting the numbers down is to close one or more of the women's prisons, repurposing them for the male estate, and potentially releasing most female prisoners, certainly the non-violent ones.

17:31What do you think about that idea? I don't know how the men would think. that women have been sent to prison for reasons in the same way as men have. So I think that may cause some issues. I think there are an awful lot of women in prison who are victims themselves. They've been trafficked, they've been abused, and perhaps a different form of punishment or rehabilitation would be much more effective if that was done in the community. I don't know the numbers now, but there are a few women in prison who are there for violent crimes. I think everyone would accept that they should probably remain in custody.

18:07But it's not as simple as closing a women's prison today and opening it as a men's prison tomorrow because there's an awful lot of work that has to go on before that switch takes place. Specification for a men's prison is the security is much stronger and there are various other issues that would need to be replaced. Behind these bars is a man who has been in prison for 11 years for stealing a mobile phone. Thomas White had multiple prior convictions for theft before he was eventually given an IPP sentence in 2012. Thomas has spent almost half of his 11 years in segregation. And what about this idea of releasing the IPP prisoners, the prisoners who were given these indeterminate sentences that have been abolished for 15 years now?

18:55Now we've got people who are languishing in prison for approaching two decades, but often quite minor crimes. Do you think that's the solution? Well, there aren't that many of them, but it would create some space. And I think even the Secretary of State who created IPPs has accepted that it was a poor idea. And, you know, the suicide rates amongst those who are given IPPs is significantly higher than the rest of the population. And I think they have to persuade a parole board that they're fit to be released. that they're not a risk to the public. The longer you're held in custody, the harder that becomes because of the mental health issues that arise from not knowing when you're going to be released.

19:34You talked earlier about people counting down to when they'd be let out and the way that they sort of hang on to that during their sentence. If you haven't got an end date, you can't do that. And I think that must be so very, very difficult. Yeah. And another thing I've heard being considered is remanding far fewer people in custody in prison when they're awaiting trial or sentence. And I think that was about 15 ,000 people at the last count. What do you think are the pros and cons of doing that? I suppose the trouble is we come back to the concerns of victims again, don't we? In everything I've said, I understand how victims feel about people being released, especially when it's perceived as being early.

20:15But as I understand it, the advice around remanding somebody into jail is that they should be expected to get a custodial sentence at the end of it. And really it should be for violent crimes or the people who might abscond. I suspect there's an awful lot of people on remand who don't meet those criteria. So I think, once again, it's something that perhaps could be reviewed. So, yeah, a lot of these things are good ideas, but they're not something that I think will work within a matter of weeks or months.

20:45Coming up, is the probation service ready to rehabilitate 5 ,000 prisoners released early into the community?

21:04This morning the Prime Minister met officers on the beat in Derbyshire. Tonight their acting chief constable joined every single police chief in the UK in a letter urging the Prime Minister not to let P.C. Harper's killers out early. Peter, while Andy Burnham scrambles to find a solution, the pressure is continuing to build against him. On Tuesday night, 50 police leaders, including every single police constable in England and Wales, signed a letter calling on him to do everything in his power to stop PC Harbour's killers from benefiting from this early release system. And they said that there was a profound strength of feeling across policing that this shouldn't happen.

21:41Just how much pressure is Burnham under on that particular case? A huge amount of pressure. I mean, he already knew before the police chief's letter came out you know he was open that he accepted the strength of feeling amongst the public but this is an unprecedented letter to have 50 police chiefs across the uk basically every chief constable and equivalent from the entire country is something that i've never seen before and the language was relatively calm it was saying you know we understand you're trying to get this done but you really have to get it done and it basically means that he's going to have to deliver on these promises.

22:16And the promises are currently a bit vague. So the Ministry of Justice has got a lot of work to do in only a few weeks. Yeah. And how have the other parties responded? In the ways you would expect. And I'm not here to say that everything that happened under Conservatives was perfect. We also had early release schemes, but we never, ever released this category of criminals. The Conservatives, who are the people who, you know, even themselves would privately admit caused the problem are basically saying, oh, early release is terrible. Why are they doing this? You know, labour is soft on crime. It's fair enough.

22:51That's what oppositions do, even if it's a slightly shameless thing to do. Reform UK held a press conference earlier in the week to say that they would clear prisons of overseas prisoners by sending them either to their home countries or for those who could not or are unable to go to their home countries to prisons in El Salvador. To house a foreign national offender in El Salvador, will be half the cost of housing a foreign national offender in this country and will give us more prison spaces. Which has got one of the most notoriously bad human rights records for prisons in the world. And I'm not quite sure if it would ever happen.