Yesterday’s statement on prison reforms from the Justice Secretary Alex Chalk was very much one of those why-didn’t-you-see-this-coming affairs. Chalk has only been in the brief since April, but he has had more warning than the past fortnight that prison capacity was running out.
One of the problems Chalk has is that he is mopping up thirteen messy years for the Ministry of Justice
Yesterday he sought to reframe the story by arguing he had in fact seen it coming. He told MPs: ‘I have been candid from the moment I took on this role that our custodial estate is under pressure.’ But he tried to suggest that this was as much a Covid problem as it was anything else: saying it was the remand population which had seen the greatest increase in numbers because the government had decided not to do away with jury trials during lockdowns.
To deal with the capacity problem, he announced a number of different measures.
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