David Shipley

The Sentencing Council – the organisation that advises judges on how long convicted criminals should be locked up for – has hit back at criticism from the Justice Secretary. Shabana Mahmood challenged the Council’s apparent embrace of ‘two-tier justice’ last week, after it told judges to order a pre-sentence report (PSR) if an offender is from a minority background. Lord Justice William Davis, the Council's chair, has now responded – and has doubled down on its new guidance to judges. Davis said that Mahmood and her officials had been briefed in advance about the instructions on sentencing offenders from ethnic minorities. He also said that ministers could not "dictate" sentencing and vowed to take legal advice.

Robert Jenrick, the shadow justice secretary, has accused his Labour counterpart Shabana Mahmood of not believing in ‘equality under the law’ and ‘enshrining’ a ‘double standard’ over who is, and isn't, sent to prison. The accusations against Mahmood – and the Labour government – came after new guidelines from the Sentencing Council were published, which appear to make prison less likely for ‘ethnic’, ‘cultural’ and ‘faith’ minorities who are convicted of crimes. This shake-up appears driven by a belief that the justice system is biased against minorities The Sentencing Council's updated rules state that, for a number of groups, the assumption should be in favour of a pre-sentence report (PSR).

There are just over a thousand men’s prison places left in the UK out of a total of 88,618 total. Where does the government go from here? Are our prisons about to run out of space? If they do, will we see even earlier releases? To put these figures from the start of the week in context, in August 2024 there were only around 700 spaces available. In the aftermath of the Summer riots there were concerns that courts might have to stop jailing people. Disaster was only averted by the government’s early release scheme, SDS40, under which thousands of additional prisoners were released in September and October. Meanwhile, David Gauke’s Sentencing Review has been underway since October, and has described our prisons as ‘on the brink of collapse’.

Former justice secretary David Gauke’s Independent Sentencing Review (ISR), running since October, was not due to report until the spring. However, following the latest published prison population statistics, which showed there are only just over 1,000 spaces left in men’s prisons and soaring numbers for serious further offences, an interim report has been published. It makes for revolutionary reading. As Gauke says, he is confronting ‘the consequences of decades of haphazard policy making and underinvestment in the criminal justice system – bringing it to the brink of collapse.’ Our justice system catches and jails fewer people, yet the prison population continues to soar. Why?

Now that the Southport killer Axel Rudakubana has been sentenced for his horrific crimes, we can try to understand how he was free to kill, and what can be done to stop crimes like this in the future. Between 2019 and 2021, this young man was referred three times to Prevent, the counter-extremism programme. On each occasion they took no further action. Yesterday the government released a redacted version of the ‘learning review’ conducted by Prevent, carried out in the wake of Rudakubana's attack. It’s a limited piece of work, and far from the full public inquiry we need. The reviewer wasn’t able to interview anyone involved, so limited their investigation to information stored on Prevent’s database.

The details of the terrible murder of Sarah Mayhew are almost too appalling to bear, but one question stands out most of all: why was the convicted murderer who killed her free to take Sarah's life? Sansom had murdered before, when he was just 19 Sarah, a 38-year-old mother of two, was lured to a flat in south London last March and never seen again. Steve Sansom and his partner, Gemma Watts, killed Sarah in a manner which involved sexual and sadistic conduct. The killers had previously exchanged messages detailing a desire to kill people with a knife or knives while engaged in sexual activity. After's Sarah's murder, the couple dismembered her and dumped her remains in different locations around London.

Southport killer Axel Rudakubana will serve a minimum of 52 years in prison for the horrific murder of three young girls. But despite the lengthy sentence handed to the teenager at Liverpool Crown Court today, it's hard to say that justice has been served. Rudakubana should die behind bars, yet the law prevented the judge, Mr Justice Goose, from handing Rudakubana a whole-life sentence. It is possible that Rudakabana will be a free man at the age of 70. This is abhorrent. To see why the possibility that Rudakubana may ever be released is such a grave injustice, it's worth revisiting the horrific details of the case. It is possible that Rudakabana will be a free man at the age of 70. This is abhorrent Rudakubana planned his murders.

‘The Amazon Killer’, screams the Sun front page today. ‘Total disgrace he was able to buy knife on Amazon,’ says the Daily Mirror. The backlash to the news that Southport murderer Axel Rudakubana brought his weapon online has been swift. But blaming Amazon for what happened on that horrific day last summer is missing the point. Rudakubana admitted to carrying a knife ten times Rudakubana, who was 17 when he attacked a group of children at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class in July, was a troubled individual who had a history of carrying knives. His guilty plea this week has meant that details of his case – and the shocking failure of the state to stop him – have emerged.

Britain should move thousands of inmates into low-security open prisons, according to David Gauke, the former Tory justice secretary, who is chairing the government’s Sentencing Review. Gauke's comments have sparked a predictably furious backlash, but he's absolutely correct – and I should know. Locking someone up costs the public about £52,000 per prison place each year “We don’t make as much use of open prisons as we might do,” says Gauke, who thinks open prisons might be the answer to addressing the prison overcrowding crisis and reducing reoffending. The reality is that open prisons are one of the few parts of the justice system that work well. It makes sense to make better use of them.

What is the British Transport Police playing at? Biologically male officers identifying as female will be allowed to intimately search women so long as they have a gender recognition certificate (GRC). The guidance, which was revealed by the Daily Telegraph, shows that the police aren’t quick to learn lessons when it comes to resolving the question of who should, and shouldn’t, be allowed to search female suspects. Imagine a vulnerable woman being told that an officer who is male is going to strip search her The trouble is that, while a GRC allows trans people to have their ‘acquired gender’ legally recognised in the UK, it remains the case that a person cannot change their biological sex. A GRC is a document issued to make things easier for trans people.

Two recently-released prisoners have lifted the lid on corruption and sexual harassment in Britain's prisons. Beatrice Auty, who was imprisoned for money laundering, said that she was harassed by a male prison officer at HMP Bronzefield in Surrey. A former officer, Lee Davis, who spent two years in prison for corruption, also told the BBC of a culture where staff routinely use their knowledge of security measures to smuggle contraband inside. It doesn’t take many officers who don't follow the rules to undermine the entire system The company that runs HMP Bronzefield, said that, while it cannot comment on individual cases, 'where complaints are received about any employee, we undertake all appropriate investigations and take necessary actions as needed'.

Yesterday, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) published its annual report on crime in England and Wales. This combines data on crimes reported to the police and the Crime Survey for England and Wales to produce the best estimate of how much crime is being committed. It makes for grim reading. While overall crime is up 10 per cent, some offences have soared. Robbery is up from an estimated 60,000 incidents last year to an estimated 139,000 this year, although the ONS say they prefer to use the police reported figures for robbery which show a rise of 6 per cent, from 77,106 to 81,931. Meanwhile, violence with injury is estimated to have risen from 376,000 to 562,000 (a 49 per cent increase). Shoplifting has risen by 29 per cent to reach a record high, of 469,788 offences.

September’s tranche of early releases did not go as smoothly as the government might have hoped. Footage of delighted prisoners celebrating outside jails, or saying ‘I’m a lifelong Labour voter now’ will, no doubt, resurface in Reform’s local election campaign videos in the spring. Then there was Amari Ward, the man who allegedly sexually assaulted a woman within minutes of his release (a charge he denies), and the subsequent discovery that he, and 36 other men who’d been jailed for breaching restraining orders, had been released in error. Compounding this sense of disorder was the discovery that Serco, the Ministry of Justice’s outsourced ‘tagging’ provider, had been failing to tag prisoners for weeks after release.

One of the new government’s first decisions was to announce that most prisoners would be released 40 per cent of the way through their sentence, not half-way through as had been the case before. In July the expectation was that around 5,500 inmates would be released early. In fact 1,700 were released in September, and around 1,100 are expected to be released this week. This, combined with the 600 extra prisoners after August’s riots, and the ongoing growth in the prison population, means we will soon run out of space again. What’s the point in releasing people 40 per cent of the way through their sentence, if they’re likely to be recalled to serve the rest within months? There’s currently space for 89,136 people in our prisons.

High-risk offenders could reportedly be released early from secure government-approved hostels. Shortly before before the election in July, the Ministry of Justice reduced the typical period people spend in an ‘Approved Premises’ from 12 weeks to eight. But what are Approved Premises, and does this matter? ‘Approved Premises’ – or ‘APs’ – are a little-known part of the justice system. We should be more aware of them, since they’re badly, badly damaged. They exist to house people who have been released from prison but are considered to be ‘high-risk ex-offenders’.

‘Purposeful activity’ is a phrase often heard in discussions about our prisons. It describes work, training, therapeutic courses and other meaningful activities which improve prisoners’ mental health and make them less likely to behave antisocially in prison or offend after release. In theory our prisons should make sure that most prisoners are spending a significant amount of time out of their cells participating in this purposeful activity. Unfortunately, a report published last Friday by His Majesty’s Inspector of Prisons reveals that the reality falls far short of that. Of 32 closed prisons inspected in 2023-24, 30 of them were rated ‘poor or not sufficiently good’.

Before I was sentenced to prison I imagined it as a place of discipline, where we who had broken society’s rules would be taught to be better men. I could not have been more wrong. One of the most toxic, and least-understood problems with the British prison system is the moral code it teaches. Terrible, antisocial behaviour is often rewarded. From my time in Wandsworth I think of the man who beat his elderly cellmate so badly that the man was hospitalised while his attacker was rewarded with a single cell, and the most desirable job in the gardens. Another man trashed his cell and was placated with an Xbox.