Rishi Sunak wants to be tough on crime, but there's a catch: prisons are full
A new dawn has broken, has it not? Operation Early Dawn, that is. This is the emergency measure the government has activated which means suspected criminals could be set free on bail instead of heading to jail, due to a lack of prison places.
As our courts correspondent Tristan Kirk reports, the measure is designed to avoid defendants being remanded in custody, only for them to be stuck on a prison van with no jail cell to be transferred to. Operation Early Dawn also follows a separate decision by ministers to cut short some prison sentences by up to 70 days, again with the aim of easing overcrowding.
Why is this necessary? Law Society of England and Wales president Nick Emmerson said: “What is crystal clear is the prison spaces crisis is a consequence of the government’s approach to justice including over a decade of underfunding of our criminal justice system, which also sees chronic shortages of judges and lawyers, huge backlogs of cases and crumbling courts.”
This is clearly a presentational issue for the government, but one that derives from a substantive problem that cannot be spun for the simple reason that it is unspinnable: prisons are full. And the direction of travel is not particularly encouraging either.
The Ministry of Justice's central projection is that the prison population will rise to 105,800 by March 2028, around 18,000 higher than in March this year. While there is considerable uncertainty surrounding these figures, the long-term increase is predicated on several factors, such as continued growth in police charging and prosecutorial activity as well as reduced Crown Court outstanding case loads.
The government did have a plan to deliver 20,000 additional prison places by the mid-2020s. However, these are now unlikely to be made available until end of the decade because of a very British bottleneck: planning law.
Responding to Keir Starmer at Prime Minister's Questions today, Rishi Sunak stated that no one who poses a threat to public safety will be released early. Yet a report published yesterday into HMP Lewes by the Chief Inspector of Prisons found that high-risk prisoners are being released early. This includes one prisoner the report said had a "history of stalking, domestic abuse" and was "subject to a restraining order." He was also considered "a risk to children".
This would be damaging even if it weren't also the week the prime minister was seeking to persuade voters that Labour and Starmer cannot be trusted on security. More broadly, it also feeds into the narrative that public services aren't really working (people not being able to get a GP appointment) and when the government tries to pull levers, nothing happens (it wants to be tough on crime but doesn't have the prisons).
It is another reason I suspect that should the economy continue to improve, interest rates fall and wage growth surpass inflation, the government is unlikely to receive much of the credit.
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