Are you ready for SDS40? You might need to be if you’re unlucky enough to live in a high crime area. This is the anodyne descriptor for the government’s emergency release of an estimated 5,000 offenders this month and next, having served only 40 per cent of their sentence in prison custody. This is the result of a hospital pass from the outgoing Conservative government who passed laws to lock more people up for longer without any coherent thought about where they would be banged up.
The statutory instrument to allow this release in two tranches comes into effect on 10 September. About 2,000 prisoners are set to be released then into community supervision by the probation service. We have been assured by the Ministry of Justice that these are low-risk prisoners and there are robust arrangements in place to keep communities safe, including their return to custody if they breach licence conditions.
The profile of these offenders is that the majority of them will commit further offences
We are told that these arrangements are unfortunate but necessary to guarantee space for serious offenders and to avert gridlock. But as is frequently the case with this department, risk management and message management are strange bedfellows. In July, Shabanna Mahmood, newly in post as Lord Chancellor, imagined a scenario where looters roamed the streets if action wasn’t taken to free up space. The looters obliged just a month later and hundreds have been charged to custody with hundreds more to come eating up the space that SDS40 was designed to buy.
Moreover, analysis by Channel 4 has revealed that it is perfectly possible that serious offenders serving consecutive sentences of a lesser gravity might well fall into scope for release. Prisoners do not commit linear offences. Habitual offenders can move from serious interpersonal violence in the past to petty crime now. The safety net has holes in it. It is highly likely that criminals with serious offences in the past will be released into the community early and will reoffend. That much is presumably priced into an uncomfortable political calculation on the lesser of two evils.
What is unquestionable? The risk is transferred from prisons to the street. The profile of these offenders is that the majority of them will commit further offences. The mitigation is good community supervision including the ability of supervising probation officers to send people on licence back to prison if they reoffend.
Is that supervision for those thousands who will be let out early a reality? No. All the evidence to date shows a probation service that is failing to cope now, let alone when hastily cobbled legislation throws a huge new workload at officers on the front line. A Channel 4 investigation has revealed that probation officers on average have been handling excessive workloads (over 110 per cent) every month of the last year. Sickness data from the MoJ shows probation staff take over two working weeks of sickness absence a year on average – and well over half of that designated as stress.
These are people who make hugely consequential decisions on risk and danger every year. It is no wonder they are falling apart. This performance is ‘moral injury’ in action – giving too few people, who are badly led and supported, an impossible task. It also explains to some extent the number of high profile failures in supervision that have led to appalling consequences. The probation inspectorate review into the sexual assault and murder of Zara Aleena by an offender under supervision says the ‘practice deficits’ that directly led to her death were set against a background of excessive workloads and unlearned lessons.
The most likely response by tired and overworked probation officers to receiving yet more supervision responsibility is probably the worst possible outcome for this last roll of the dice to avert disaster. That is they are likely to be risk-averse and find reasons to get released offenders back into custody rather than have them inadequately supervised – which somewhat defeats the purpose of an exercise to create space.
It’s not clear also whether any thought beyond ‘brace, brace’ has been given to the impact on all the other creaking public services that will have to absorb these newly released prisoners. GP surgeries, pharmacies, housing departments, benefits offices will all be besieged by people in high need who will be even more likely to reoffend if they haven’t got access. Many of those released if they have an address in the first place will return to poor communities tortured by crime and antisocial behaviour and derelict of authority. It’s going to be a very rocky few weeks. Any space gained will be a temporary respite at best.
All of the people now engaged in frantic planning across the prison and probation service will want this scheme to work. There’s no credible alternative. The leadership contenders for the Conservative party would do well to show some humility over the catastrophic decline in the criminal justice system their party presided over in government which has led to this invidious position. But that is old news.
This new government faces a test on public safety that citizens cannot afford it to lose. After the dust settles, if it ever does, we need to turn to a fundamental examination of why we lock people up and why we are so good at making bad people worse. That difficult debate has been evaded for decades. Time’s up.
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