Victims will start receiving letters from today informing them that they will be affected by the early release of prisoners, after Andy Burnham confirmed that those convicted of manslaughter will be exempt from the scheme. The Prime Minister had been responding largely to the outcry over the potential release of two of the killers of PC Andrew Harper. While those two men should remain behind bars, Burnham’s solution has left the prisons system in an even more precarious position. This is always the risk when politicians make policy because of an emotional reaction: they can end up skewing the system in a way that has quite profound consequences elsewhere.
In this case, though, there are profound consequences whether prisoners are released early or kept inside. Victims Commissioner Claire Waxman, who has been very blunt on the impact of the confusion over who is being released and the protections for victims, was this morning complaining again that there was a ‘disconnect at the moment from what the government is saying in relation to these new restriction zones, and what’s actually going to be available in practice’. She also pointed out that the probation service is already overstretched: come October, it could well fall over entirely.
There are also knock-on impacts on child protection services, with children who were previously considered at lower risk because a domestic abuser was in prison now having to be reassessed and placed in higher risk categories. Only 5 per cent of child protection services are fully staffed, according to the British Association of Social Work, and many child protection social workers have an unmanageable caseload already as a result.
Police chiefs, meanwhile, have been warning that they don’t have the resources to track offenders who have been tagged under the conditions of their early release. What this means is that either officers will have to be diverted once again from the kind of neighbourhood policing that top politicians like to pay noisy lip service to but never manage to resource – or that those who breach their conditions are not then arrested and brought back into the justice system. Prisons themselves are expecting to see many of their inmates who are released early return within the next year as they reoffend.
There are so many services that cannot cope with their current levels of demand which are going to be overwhelmed by the solution to a crisis in another service. What we are seeing now is not just a meltdown in prisons, but a passing of ‘can’t cope’ from one service to another, depending on which one looks like it might fall over first.
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