Around 2,000 prisoners will be freed early on just one day next month. A further 1,700 will then be released in October.
This is after the new Labour government changed the law to allow prisoners to be released after serving just 40% rather than the current 50% of their sentences.
On paper, the move is designed to free up prison space after the Conservatives mismanaged the service so badly. However, senior figures in the government have also made it clear that too many people are going to prison in the first place.
Criminals convicted of violence—although not sexual offenders or terrorists—who have been jailed for less than four years will be among those released on September 10th.
The government has worked to reassure Britons that “this will not impact [the police’s] ability to arrest criminals.” Indeed, many of the spaces which are being freed up could soon be given to those arrested during the riots triggered by the Southport stabbing, instead.
A 69-year-old grandfather earlier this month became the oldest rioter to be jailed for violent disorder. A 53-year-old woman has also been handed a 15-month jail sentence after calling on Facebook for a mosque to “be blown up with the adults inside.”
Labour’s prisons minister, James Timpson, openly believes that Britain is “addicted to sentencing.” But presumably, he thinks these riot-related offenders deserve everything they’re about to get.
The Conservative Woman editor Kathy Gyngell described the move to release thousands from prison to “make way for ‘armchair rioters’”—that is, those who have been pursued for posting unlawful content online—as “neither just nor moral.”
The Ministry of Justice has stressed that “anyone released will be strictly monitored on licence by the Probation Service through measures which can include electronic tagging and curfews,” and that “they face being recalled to prison if they breach their licence conditions.” But these services are already so stressed that concerned citizens might consider this with an air of scepticism.
