More early releases won’t solve the prison crisis

September’s tranche of early releases did not go as smoothly as the government might have hoped. Footage of delighted prisoners celebrating outside jails, or saying ‘I’m a lifelong Labour voter now’ will, no doubt, resurface in Reform’s local election campaign videos in the spring. Then there was Amari Ward, the man who allegedly sexually assaulted a woman within minutes of his release (a charge he denies), and the subsequent discovery that he, and 36 other men who’d been jailed for breaching restraining orders, had been released in error. Compounding this sense of disorder was the discovery that Serco, the Ministry of Justice’s outsourced ‘tagging’ provider, had been failing to tag prisoners for weeks after release. 

The probation trade union Napo have said ‘the first tranche of…releases placed a huge amount of additional work on probation staff across England and Wales…as Napo feared would be the case, our members have reported that a significant number of those released so far have been already been recalled to custody’.