Just over a week ago Andy Burnham came under attack over the impending early releases from prison. His critics included the widow of Andrew Harper, a policeman killed on duty in 2019 by being dragged behind a car for a mile. Andrew’s widow, Lissie, described the possible early release of two of his killers as ‘deplorable’. Burnham insisted that ‘keeping the public safe will be my top priority’ and said of the early release policy that he would ‘look at in detail before we go further forward’.
Clearly Burnham wanted to do anything to avoid being the PM who released rapists early. But he will still be releasing men who have done very awful things
Now, having presumably done all the detailed looking, the PM has a plan, just in time for the start of his holiday. Those who have committed ‘rape, serious child sex and other grooming offences’ will not be eligible for the early release scheme, and although this isn’t made clear in the published statements I understand that those who have sexually assaulted children will also not be eligible.
This is something at least: clearly Burnham wanted to do anything to avoid being the PM who released rapists early. But he will still be releasing men who have done very awful things. PC Andrew Harper’s killers will be eligible for early release. Lissie Harper is ‘beyond appalled’ and ‘bristling with anger’, and no wonder. For all Burnham’s words, he’s done nothing for her. It’s clear from the tone of the press release that not even Burnham thinks it’s a great plan – he says that ‘I want to be honest – I wanted to go even further as I know there will still be concerns about other offenders having their sentence shortened. But it’s not possible without the prison system reaching capacity and collapsing, which would put public safety at much greater risk’.
The problem he has is that the early releases are already putting the public at greater risk. According to the latest data, covering people who were released from custody, received a non-custodial conviction at court, or received a caution between July to September 2024, ‘proven reoffending’ meaning the person committed an offence in the following year, and was caught, is up to 29.9 per cent, with each proven reoffender committing an average of over five new crimes.
In plain numbers, of the 87,000 offenders who were studied, around 26,000 committed more than 133,000 proven reoffences. At least 133,000 victims, and likely far more – after all, only 7.3 per cent of crimes last year resulted in a charge, meaning there might be up to 1.8 million ‘reoffences’ being committed by people who were set free. Alongside this between January and March of 2026, for the first time ever, more people were recalled to prison than were released. In comparison, back in 2012, the ratio of recalls to releases was 1:5. The government plans to monitor offenders who’ve been released – ‘tougher community supervision and new GPS monitoring’ – but as I wrote recently, the tagging system is broken too.
What all this points to is the collapse of the justice system. As I have warned before, without probation functioning, with tagging broken and without any real rehabilitation happening in jails, early releases just mean sending people out to commit more crime, and then be returned to prison. And now we are starting to see it showing in the data. Early releases mean more crime, and the next phase, now planned from October onwards, is only going to accelerate this process, as our struggling probation service and broken tagging system are asked to manage ever more dangerous prisoners.
Labour are in a bind – they’ve bet the justice system, and our safety, on an early release gamble which is now failing. While it’s good that the worst sex offenders won’t be released early, it’s not enough. In his statement, Burnham said that ‘keeping the public safe is my top priority’ and according to the Ministry of Justice the PM is also hoping to remove foreign offenders faster, free up space in the women’s prison estate and ‘review outdated Imprisonment for Public Protection sentences’. While speeding foreign criminal deportations would help protect the public, the other two ideas will not. A higher percentage of women prisoners are in jail for violence than men, and Imprisonment for Public Protection (IPP) sentences, while often considered a historic injustice, were generally applied to men who had committed very serious acts of violence. Releasing them early will please the left, but it will absolutely not make us safer.
What we need is enough prison capacity so that we can jail those we want to jail. If Burnham really wants to fix the justice system and keep the public safe, then he needs to make that happen, even if it’s necessary to use primary legislation to force the building of new jails. Everything else is fiddling while the system fails.
Comments