Early release scheme

Yesterday

Lara Brown

How mandarins sabotaged a rare prison success story

Britain’s prisons are in crisis. So, naturally, Whitehall has managed to snuff out one of the few organisations that might know how to fix them. Unlocked Graduates was founded in 2016 by Natasha Porter, a former teacher. Its goal was to solve one of the prison service’s most fundamental problems: the quality of its workforce. Prison officers have long been treated as glorified security guards. Applicants need not possess a single GCSE. Almost all candidates will never attend a face-to-face job interview and the governor does not meet those being recruited. Unsurprisingly, this system has not yielded good results. Unlocked changed this.

Max Jeffery

The prison early release scheme is already a disaster

Four days after he was released from HMP Wandsworth, Michael Bogle was back inside. The 38-year-old had served 11 of 32 weeks in prison for stealing before he was freed last month via the government’s early release scheme. He strolled out of jail, told reporters he would ‘hopefully not’ shoplift again, then stole from a Sainsbury’s a few hours later. The early release scheme was meant to increase prison capacity. But it isn’t working. Since it began two years ago, 80,000 people have been freed, yet there are just 1,000 extra prison spaces. Last week, the Ministry of Justice revealed that more offenders were recalled to jail in the first half of this year (25,531) than were let out (25,255).