Keir Starmer’s government is stepping up its unpopular announcements. After deciding to scrap an energy subsidy for pensioners, which is causing turmoil even in his Labour ranks, the British Prime Minister has decided to take an extreme measure. On Tuesday 10 September, 1,700 prisoners were released from English and Welsh prisons (Northern Ireland and Scotland have their own prison systems) before even having served half of their sentence (40% of the length of their sentence has been served). Up to 5,500 prisoners are expected to be subject to this extraordinary provision by the end of October.
For the British government, the aim is to urgently free up places in overcrowded prisons at a time when, following the riots in July and August in the country, hundreds of people are being sentenced to prison terms. “I have no choiceShabana Mahmood, Minister of Justice, explained on Tuesday in the columns of Daily mirror. When I became a minister [en juillet]I was told that our prisons could be overcrowded at any moment. If this happens, our justice system will be paralyzed. […] It’s all the fault of the last conservative government. [conservateur] who preferred to call early elections rather than confront the problem. »
The numbers speak for themselves. According to the latest report, published by the Justice Minister on Friday 6 September, the prison population was at its highest at the beginning of September, with 88,521 people behind bars in English and Welsh prisons (1,159 more than at the beginning of August) and only 1,098 places left free (1.2% of the total). The prison population has continued to rise in recent years due to the increasing number of people on remand, and waiting times for trials have continued to increase since the Covid-19 pandemic. In March, 19% of the prison population was on remand. Prison sentences, meanwhile, are getting longer: more than 32,200 people were serving sentences of four years or more in English and Welsh prisons in June 2023, 36% more than in June 2010.
The early release system is not entirely new: Rishi Sunak’s Conservative government was forced to adopt the same interim measure and began releasing prisoners who had served 50% of their sentence in the autumn of 2023. But this measure was not enough to relieve prison congestion and the Labour Party had to extend it by expanding it. To reassure the British in the face of a necessarily worrying new decision, the Ministry of Justice promised that no one convicted of a violent, sexual or domestic violence crime would be released early.
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