Offenders will be released early to reduce prison overcrowding ━ The European Conservative

Public confidence in the British criminal justice system has been shaken by an avoidable combination of stresses resulting from puzzling policy decisions.

First, the early release programme announced by Justice Minister Shabana Mahmood last month to reduce overcrowding was started ahead of schedule, reducing inmates' sentences.

Second, on Friday, August 23, judges were ordered to stop detaining criminals in order to defuse the “prison crisis.”

Third, the official push for more leniency on crime in general coincided with the accelerated detention of participants in the riots following the fatal knife attack on three little girls in the English seaside town of Southport – and the imprisonment of others for related social media activity.

The times reported that Lord Justice Nicholas Green of the UK Court of Appeal has issued a “listing direction” to heads of magistrates' courts in England and Wales, calling for sentencing for offenders released on bail and facing a prison sentence to be postponed until September 10 at the earliest. Green wants to implement a “carefully implemented measure” that would:

Each case must be examined individually and decisions must be made based on the interests of justice.

In practice, this means many will remain in police custody before being transferred to the prison system. For the general public, however, it means that serious criminals will be released onto the streets – where they are likely to reoffend – to free up (and then refill) 5,500 prison spaces by the end of the year.

As Britain prepares for the August long weekend, the skewed priorities of the newly elected Labour government under former Attorney General Sir Keir Starmer coincide with growing public concern about violent crime. The news that 2,000 prisoners will be released in early September – not because they have been rehabilitated, but to free up beds – is unlikely to reassure anyone.

Some of those currently detained on bail or in police custody are likely to fill the vacant places in prisons next month, but there is considerable unease about what could happen in the coming weeks if potentially dangerous men are left unsupervised. They will be joined on October 22 by up to 1,700 other newly released prisoners, due to be released after serving just 40 percent of their sentences. Overall, the government is caught in its self-imposed technocratic quest to free up places while sparing those convicted the punishment appropriate for their crime.

Labour blames its Conservative predecessors for the situation, which includes a decaying Victorian prison as its legacy. That's not entirely true: for example, £286 million (€337 million) was spent building the new HMP Fosse Way, a Category C prison with a planned capacity of 1,930 men that opened on May 29 last year. Three men there are already facing a murder trial after killing a fellow inmate who, like all English and Welsh prisoners, was subject to the UK Home Secretary's “duty of care”.

The government's behaviour so far suggests that it is combining indifference to crime and punishment in general with a vindictive approach to those linked to the August riots. An early symptom of this is 33-year-old Rees Newman, who was given a suspended sentence last December for the rape of a girl under the age of 14 in 2005. When Newman later breached the terms of his suspended sentence, he avoided another prison sentence because he wanted to get a bigger picture in Britain's prisons.

“Child rapist spared from prison sentence due to prison overcrowding crisis,” barked the Daily MailThis is not tabloid clickbait scaremongering: releasing rapists to lock up social media abusers is exactly what voters fear under the “two-tier Keir” Starmer.