Andy Burnham has released around 700 prisoners early from Britain’s prisons, reducing the amount of time they have spent serving behind bars to just one-third of their overall sentence. This is only the first ‘tranche’ of prisoners set to be released. By the end of the year this number will climb to about 2,500.
Burnham is now the second prime minister who, upon entering office, has been forced to take the extremely unpopular decision of releasing prisoners early. Months after his election, Burnham’s predecessor Keir Starmer was forced to release thousands of prisoners as prison occupancy levels rose to 99 per cent. You may recall the images of released convicts popping champagne.
Britain is in the midst of a prison capacity crisis. While this government rightly blames its predecessors for only adding a net total of 500 additional spaces to the prison estate over fourteen years, it isn’t doing that much better.
New prisons are being built slowly, bogged down in the usual bureaucratic quagmire of planning and procurement regulations. Resigned to this fact, the government has accepted that the only way to manage the prison population is by significantly reducing the amount of time prisoners serve in custody – freeing up space by releasing thousands early.
All of this is catastrophic for public confidence in the state
This policy has been hard-baked into legislation. The Sentencing Act 2026 reduced the amount of time most adults serving standard sentences in prison from 40 per cent of their sentence (already introduced by Starmer temporarily) to just one-third. Offenders convicted of serious violent or sexual crimes have also had their release point dropped from two-thirds to 50 per cent.
This has a corrosive effect on the entire criminal justice system. Britain’s probation service – itself beset with problems – has warned that it will struggle to manage the additional caseload of released prisoners on licence. Members of the service have already voted overwhelmingly in favour of strike action in a non-statutory ballot, with a formal ballot due soon. Released convicts with a history of serious violence will walk the streets unmonitored.
Full prisons inevitably affect the performance of the courts and the police. Sentencing decisions become influenced by capacity constraints, rather than ensuring that crimes are met with commensurate punishment. Police officers reconsider whether to arrest and charge criminals, knowing that it’s unlikely they’ll spend time behind bars.
All of this is catastrophic for public confidence in the state. All summer the newspapers covered the public disbelief in the fact that the killers of PC Andrew Harper were set to be released early. A million people signed a petition to block the release, eventually forcing a U-turn from Burnham. Recent polling suggests that just 8 per cent of the public support early release.
The Prime Minister has indicated that he is considering alternative ways to manage the crisis, which don’t seem promising. Speeding up the deportation of foreign national offenders is extremely difficult without leaving the European Convention on Human Rights, something Burnham has refused to countenance. The alternative of releasing female prisoners and those serving IPP (Imprisonment for Public Protection) sentences reverts to releasing dangerous criminals onto Britain’s streets.
At the same time, operating prisons near maximum capacity makes it difficult to enact any types of reform. Deteriorating conditions inside prisons, which have seen a proliferation of organised crime gangs operating with impunity, increase the danger for both inmates and staff.
Even those who politically support the greater use of non-custodial sentencing should concede that the capacity crisis severely undermines the effectiveness of this alternative. Without the threat of a prison sentence, many community-based measures such as the use of criminal behaviour orders or exclusion orders lose their power to deter offenders. Why obey the provisions when you know that the prisons are full?
It doesn’t have to be like this. A new report by the Prosperity Institute, Making Space for Justice, outlines the scale of the capacity crisis and proposes urgent measures to create more space. Changes to government procurement would allow for the building of rapid prefabricated prison sites, while the purchasing of existing disused office and accommodation sites would enable the creation of thousands of extra spaces at a fraction of the price of a new prison.
The paper also proposes increasing the overall prison capacity to 120,000 over a parliamentary cycle, putting the estate on a more sustainable footing which would help reform prison management and improve the recruitment of prison officers. In 2019, the Ministry of Justice conducted several site surveys for new prisons, many of which were discounted for minor reasons. These could be revived to allow the build out of more spaces.
Without building more spaces, every new prime minister will likely be forced to oversee some form of prisoner release in the foreseeable future. But this is a political decision. The government must recognise that prison capacity sits at the heart of the crisis in the justice system, and act with the urgency the situation demands.
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