Britain’s prisons are full: over the August Bank Holiday weekend, there were fewer than 100 men’s prison places remaining. The number of spaces has now risen slightly but the crisis remains: our prisons are running out of space. This will have serious consequences – and it isn’t good enough for Keir Starmer to keep blaming the Tories.
Keir Starmer used a speech this week to blame the Tories
Magistrates have been told to stop jailing people until after 10 September when Labour’s early release scheme will take effect. Under that system, most prisoners will be released after having served 40 per cent of their sentence; on day one, around 2,000 prisoners will be let out. The government hopes that this mass release (followed by another 2,500 on a single day in October) will buy them the time to create further capacity in the system. But this is far from guaranteed.
These offenders will be released into the supervision of our probation service. Unfortunately, this is an organisation that is already in crisis and desperately understaffed. There is a shortfall of over 2,100 probation officers, according to the latest government statistics. The government has promised an extra 1,000 probation officers by March 2025, but this is an ambitious target that will do little to enable the proper supervision of those prisoners being released over the coming months. Trainee hiring has collapsed, down over 57 per cent on the previous year. The probation service even lost 178 qualified probation officers in the last three months. How will the probation service – which is verging on collapse – manage to supervise the 4,500 prisoners being let out in September and October? This crucial part of the criminal justice system is verging on collapse; if it does, expect a wave of reoffending and prison recalls. Prisons may be full again far sooner than the government expects.
Keir Starmer used a speech this week to blame the Tories, saying that their preference for ‘longer and longer sentences‘ without building enough additional prison space had created the crisis in the prison system. A Ministry of Justice (MoJ) spokesperson echoed him, saying that the ‘government inherited a justice system in crisis’. To an extent, they’re right. The justice system was broken when Labour took office, but Starmer has done exactly what he accused the Tories of within weeks of entering Number 10.
After the riots in early August, the Prime Minister insisted on swift, exemplary justice, which the courts have delivered. Starmer can’t hide behind the independence of the judiciary, as he has made clear that he was directly involved in the justice response; yesterday he said ‘literally every day – we had to check the precise number of prison places we had and where those places were. To make sure we could arrest, charge and prosecute people quickly’. The result was an influx of several hundred prisoners in a system already struggling to cope.
Had the government met its prison expansion promise this flood of new arrivals would have been manageable. On 5 August, while the riots were underway, the government promised an additional 567 prison places ‘within the month’. But in a statement issued by the MoJ today they state that they are only ‘midway’ through opening those places. Without these additional places, and without space in the prison system, we may face more situations where serious criminals, like a child rapist who breached the conditions of his suspended sentence, are spared jail because there simply isn’t the space for them.
So Starmer’s government has heaped further pressure on the prison system and failed to meet even its very conservative promise on prison expansion. Perhaps they are beginning to learn that government is far harder than opposition. As the Prime Minister said yesterday ‘not having enough prison places is about as fundamental a failure as you can get’. He’s right. And it’s his problem now.
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