In 2019, a police officer, Andrew Harper, was killed while on duty. After responding to a burglary he chased after a car, and was caught in a strap attached to it. The car was driven away, and Harper was dragged for a mile behind it, at an average speed of 42.5 miles per hour. His body was found by colleagues, and a later post-mortem showed he had died of multiple injuries, suggesting he had been caught between the car and the road. He was 28 when he died and had been married less than a month.
The car was driven by 18-year-old Henry Long. With him in the car were 17-year-olds Albert Bowers and Jessie Cole. All three were charged, and, in 2020, acquitted of murder. Long pleaded guilty to manslaughter and was sentenced to 16 years. Bowers and Cole were found guilty of manslaughter, and were each sentenced to 13 years, but it has now emerged that they may be eligible for release under the new Sentencing Act policy which due to come into effect in September.
Many people, not least Andrew’s widow, Lissie, are angry. She has described their possible early release, at the halfway point of their sentences, as ‘deplorable’. The Prime Minister has intervened, saying that he can’t ‘change the policy completely, but…will look at it in detail before we go further forward’. He went on to say: ‘keeping the public safe will always be my top priority. I am working closely with the new Justice Secretary and have instructed my team to put a pause on the changes that were due to start in September. No prisoners will be let out under this policy until we have conducted an urgent review and done everything we can to minimise risk to the public. Where changes are needed, we will not hesitate to make the.’
The PM also said, ‘On the broader issue, I feel for the family. It’s an appalling crime that was committed. The main perpetrator will not be subject to any early release. Of course, others involved have potentially been identified, but I’ve spoken to the new Justice Secretary, we will review the policy together and make further statements in due course.’
It’s not entirely clear what this means. Burnham and the new Justice Secretary Alex Norris may want to tweak the rules so that Andrew Harper’s killers aren’t released, but if they do so they will be inviting other victims and their families to demand those who hurt them are not released as well. This is perfectly natural. The great problem we have is that our sentencing policy has become entirely divorced from our intuitions.
Most of us believe that prison sentences should protect the public, punish crimes, and, if possible, help rehabilitate people. Instead we have sentencing guidelines which mean that people whose traits mean they pose more of a risk, are likely to spend less time in prison – if you are impulsive, very low IQ, or don’t understand that your crime was wrong, then these are considered mitigations, reducing the time you’ll spend inside.
Our actual prisons are not so much ‘punishing’, as crap. We lock most prisoners up for 22 or more hours a day, leaving them to stare at the TV or take drugs, which are widely available in our jails. As a result very little meaningful rehabilitation happens, and our reoffending rate remains stubbornly high.
And with the prison capacity crisis, sentencing has become even more divorced from our sense of how it should work. We are now jailing criminals and releasing them early, because we don’t have the space to imprison as many people as we would like, for as long as we would like. The Sentencing Act has established a system in which most prisoners will be released just a third of the way through their sentence, and almost all sentences shorter than a year will be served entirely in the community. We have not done this because of liberal zeal, but simply because we don’t have enough jail cells.
This is, obviously, stupid. A notionally developed, rich nation should be able to build enough prisons. But then again it also ought to be able to build railways, reservoirs, nuclear power plants and houses, and the UK struggles to do all of these.
The government, of course, continue to point at the Tories’ failure – they added a mere 500 additional prison places during their 14 years in power – but Labour are not doing much better. At the end of June there were 87,334 inmates and capacity for 89,573 in our prison system. Even with the Sentencing Act changes, by 2032 we are expected to be jailing between 92,400 and 100,000 prisoners. And yet, every major prison building programme is rated either ‘amber’ (feasible, but facing significant issues) or ‘red’ (appears unachievable) by the National Infrastructure and Service Transformation Authority.
So in fact there is very little room for Burnham or Norris to limit the early releases. No doubt Jo Farrar, the Ministry of Justice permanent secretary, and Antonia Romeo (who in charge of the department before her elevation to Cabinet Secretary) will very quickly be sitting them both down with some scary capacity charts and explaining that we can’t stop the early releases. And then, no doubt, as he’s already done on his tax promises, the PM will back down. None of this, of course, is any way to run a country.
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