Just one week after Rishi Sunak insisted voters should put their faith in the Tories once again, reports have highlighted the total chaos in which the prison system, which has been under the watch of the Conservative Party for more than 13 years, finds itself.
The list of causes is long. We reported earlier this month on the conclusion of His Majesty’s Chief Inspector of prisons that 10% of these are not “fit for purpose.” A good number, the vast majority of which are run by the government, were built in the Victorian era with much lower maximum capacities in mind, meaning accidents involving both inmates and staff are simply “waiting to happen.”
It has since emerged that judges have been told not to jail serious criminals, including rapists, because there is no room for them. The Times reported:
Convicted rapists and burglars will be temporarily spared jail from next week after judges were told that prisons are full.
Crown court judges have been ordered to delay sentencing hearings, The Times has learnt, as the prison population has reached bursting point.
Lord Justice Edis, the senior presiding judge for England and Wales, has ordered that sentencing of convicted criminals who are currently on bail should be delayed from Monday.
Not only that; some prisoners are also expected to be released early under government proposals. That is, under proposals from the very same government which has spent recent months (and years, in fact) trying to look tough and uncompromising on crime.
COVID—or, rather, lockdown and the government’s wider response to the pandemic—also has a hand in all this, as it does in much else. All jury trials in England and Wales were temporarily suspended in 2020 as part of the drive to shut the country down, resulting in a large backlog of cases. Responding to various reports, Health Secretary Steve Barclay this week accepted that the backlog exists “especially because jury trials were suspended because of Covid.” So it appears that the effort to lock citizens in their homes during lockdown is now hampering the locking up of rapists in jail.
Still, the government refused to accept that it has become ‘soft on crime.’ Security Minister Tom Tugendhat insisted that “we are absolutely clear that those who commit violent acts, sexual acts against people in the United Kingdom will go to prison and will go to prison for long periods of time to protect the British people,” pointing also to attempts to increase the number of prison places.
