Britain faces the “horrible reality” of having to release prisoners convicted of serious crimes early to prevent the “total and complete collapse” of law and order, the justice secretary has said.
Shabana Mahmood is preparing to announce the biggest shakeup of sentencing in more than 30 years on Thursday after the publication of an independent review carried out by David Gauke, the former Conservative justice secretary.
In an interview with The Times, Mahmood said she would have to make changes that were “not choices I would ever want to make”.
However, she said it was her responsibility to “fix the underlying problem once and for all” as she warned that failure to act would risk the “total breakdown of law and order in this country” leaving police unable to make arrests and courts unable to hold trials.
Among the most controversial changes will be a new “progression model” for prisoners that will allow some to be released after serving
only a third of their sentences if they behave well, and ending jail terms altogether for offenders sentenced to less than a year. Instead, these criminals will be made to serve tougher community sentences, filling potholes and clearing fly-tipping hotspots while wearing high-visibility jackets to “make it clear and obvious that this is a group of people who are repaying their debt to society”.
The government is also talking to private companies to create a scheme that would employ offenders in conventional jobs, but dock their wages and put the funds into a pot for victims.
Mahmood said that increasing the visibility of criminals carrying out unpaid work would encourage them to change their behaviour, and said she was prepared to take on trade unions who may resist a mass expansion of unpaid work out of concern it that it may threaten members’ jobs.
She said: “I do believe that there’s got to be some sense of visibility around the act of reparation. So I want to explore exactly what shape that takes. But I absolutely believe in it being clear and obvious that this is a group of people who are repaying their debt to society. I think also for offenders, while it looks like it’s a tactic for shame, it can actually be the spur to change.”
The justice secretary admitted that sending fewer criminals to jail would be “very difficult” for Labour MPs facing the threat of Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party, but said they would have to make “unpalatable choices” to fix the prisons crisis “once and for all”.
Asked what her message would be to Labour MPs facing accusations that the party had gone soft on crime, she said: “This issue and this crisis and what it means for people all over the country, it’s far above party politics. I appreciate these are very, very difficult decisions. I find making these decisions difficult for myself.
“I’ve got to consider the whole of the system, how to do right by everybody and we’re facing some very, very stark choices. It’s a horrible reality to be in. It shows the scale of the terrible inheritance that the Conservative Party left behind.
“But this is where we have a duty, we have to act in the nation’s best interest, we have to make sure that there is a criminal justice system worthy of the name. We have to make sure we don’t run out of prison places.”
Mahmood admitted that it went against her principles to make changes that would mean fewer criminals went to prison. “I would always have been described as law-and-order Labour,” she said. “I believe in strong punishment. I think that when our rules are broken you have to punish offenders to show that there are consequences.
“I grew up in a high-crime area. I know what the impacts are on community confidence when you have so-called low-level crime running amok and feeling like it goes unpunished.”
Quoting Michael Howard’s famous slogan, “prison works”, she insisted that prisons had a “vitally important role to play”.
Until last week, jails were on course to be entirely full by November, a crisis that was narrowly averted by limiting how long repeat offenders can be recalled to prison after breaching their licence conditions.
However, this is only a palliative measure and Gauke’s review will recommend a fundamental overhaul of sentencing in a bid to alleviate pressure on the system. The changes will come alongside the government’s prison building plans, with 14,000 additional places to be built by 2031.
Nearly half of these places will be created by building three new prisons, funded by a £4.7 billion package announced by Mahmood last week after securing the investment from Rachel Reeves, the chancellor. It was the first funding from the chancellor’s upcoming spending review to be confirmed publicly.
Mahmood has also secured £700 million from the Treasury to buy almost 30,000 tags, which will quadruple the number of criminals
electronically monitored by the probation service.
However, even with the new places already planned, the prison population in England and Wales, which now stands at 88,087, is projected to require another 9,500 places by 2028.
“The prison population will go up and it will have gone up by the end of this parliament quite significantly,” Mahmood said. “Building remains a key part of how we get ourselves out of this mess as well as sentence reform. Where I want to be by the end of this parliament is to be running a prison system and a wider criminal justice system that is no longer moving from crisis to crisis, where he prisons aren’t any longer on the brink of collapse.”
Gauke was tasked with finding measures to free up enough space by then and to ensure that prisons never run out of space again. One of his headline recommendations, which is set to be adopted by the government, is a new three-stage model for prisoners.
Each prisoner will be given a minimum and a maximum sentence, depending on the seriousness of their crime. The earliest a prisoner can get released will be 33 per cent of the way through their sentence, a proportion is even lower than the present emergency early release scheme introduced last autumn, under which more than 16,000 inmates have been let out after serving only 40 per cent of their sentences.
Prisoners will be able to earn their way towards the earliest release dates through good behaviour, engaging in rehabilitation programmes and regular work. If they misbehave by committing violence, are found to have contraband or refuse to work while in prison, they will have to serve longer, potentially up to their maximum sentences. Automatic early release of prisoners, which was first introduced in the 1990s, will be scrapped.
The reforms mirror the
incentive-based system introduced by Texas in 2007, which has significantly reduced the state’s prison population and reoffending rate.
Under the reforms, the typical prisoner will be released from jail early and put under house arrest, monitored by electronic tags. The final part of their sentence will be served in the community, carrying out unpaid work, for example. If they breach their conditions or commit crimes while on licence they will face being sent back to jail.
Under the reforms, thousands of serious offenders — including violent criminals — will be released from jail after serving as little as a third of their sentences.
Mahmood acknowledged that some of those released from prison early would reoffend, but pointed out that this was already the case. “The sad reality is at the moment 80 per cent of offenders are reoffenders,” she said. “So of course I cannot rule out the possibility of some of these individuals reoffending. No justice secretary ever could.” However, she said she hoped that a new graduated system of sentences would make a difference.
Another big reform will introduce a presumption against sending criminals to jail for less than 12 months. The length of suspended sentences, ow capped at two years, will also be extended.
This reform will benefit women in particular and help to achieve Mahmood’s goal of
reducing the female prison population, which now stands at 3,568, by up to two thirds.
She said: “The reason I think prison doesn’t work for women is because they go in, so many of them, for sentences of under 12 months. Sentences of under 12 months necessarily reflect less serious offences and so you end up destroying the lives of their children for those less serious offences.
“Because that harm passes down generations in such a clear, stark way, and because so many children leave the family home when Mum goes to prison in a way that’s not replicated when that might be their dad, I think we’ve got to have a public policy shift.”
Mahmood is expected to accept the bulk of Gauke’s recommendations against her own instincts. “These are not choices I would ever want to make,” she said. “Once you are basically about to hit zero capacity, we would have to convene all of the players in the criminal justice system. And police would no longer be able to make arrests. Courts can’t do trials. The best you could transition to at that point would be a one in, one out system.”
Mahmood said that however “unpalatable” the decisions she had to take were, the alternative was worse. “I can see that is the bigger disaster,” she said. “The stark reality is you’ve actually only got two choices at that point — you shut the front door in to prisons or you open the back door. No time for probation. Nothing you can do but literally use your emergency powers, cancel sentences and let people walk out. For a law-and-order Labour person, that’s unconscionable. That is the thing I’m absolutely trying to avoid at all costs.”
Mahmood acknowledged that her sentencing reforms would create “inevitable tensions” with the government’s efforts to halve knife crime and rates of male violence against women within a decade, which are being led by Yvette Cooper, the home secretary.
She insisted that restoring the criminal justice was even more important. “It’s the prime mission,” she said. “We can’t deliver justice, proper punishment for victims if the system collapses.”
