It was not quite what Labour meant when it came to power in July promising a new dawn.
Within two months the new government was forced to give criminals an early Christmas present when, instead of a new dawn, it triggered Operation Early Dawn, an emergency plan to free prisoners early to ease chronic overcrowding.
As Britain’s justice system strained under an influx of summer rioters, Labour was suddenly assailed by a barrage of provocative media images: young men in hoodies popping champagne corks in prison car parks as they welcomed out their friends who had been unexpectedly let back on to the streets.
In a nation that sees itself as a bastion of law and order, the images stoked intense debate. One freed prisoner, 20-year-old Djaber Benallaoua, thanked Labour and said he would be a “lifelong supporter” of the party. “I’m going to get lit,” he told waiting reporters, as he walked away from HMP Isis, a young offenders prison in southeast London.
Now the government, stung by criticism, has produced a new £10 billion plan to build four new prisons by 2031, while justice secretary Shabana Mahmood has also ordered a review of sentencing guidelines, with the aim of encouraging more “community sentencing” and home detention for minor offences.
“It’s still not enough,” Mahmood has warned. “We are going to have to do things differently in this country.”
England and Wales, which share a legal system, have the highest rate of incarceration of all nations in western Europe. In 2018, the most recent year for which full comparisons are available, England and Wales had three times as many prisoners per head of population as Finland, twice as many as Norway and about 75 per cent more than Germany or Ireland, according to data from Eurostat.
The escalating numbers of those banged up in Britain mean the entire system is now bursting at the seams: Scotland, too, has been forced to release prisoners early. Britain also has a chronic shortage of probation officers to monitor criminals.
The prison population of England and Wales peaked this year at 89,000, as the numbers have continued to rise by 4,500 annually.
Within a week of taking over the ministry of justice, Mahmood was waving a red flag. On July 12th, seven days after her appointment, she visited HMP Five Wells in Northamptonshire to warn that jails had been operating beyond 99 per cent capacity all year and were “weeks away” from disaster.
Mahmood warned that if prisons were stretched any further, overflow police cells would soon be all filled and arresting officers would have nowhere to hold those who had committed fresh crimes. There would be “van-loads of dangerous people circling the country with nowhere to go,” she said.
“Soon the courts would grind to a halt, unable to hold trials. With officers unable to act, criminals could do whatever they want without consequence. We could see looters running amok, smashing in windows, robbing shops and setting neighbourhoods alight. In short, if we fail to act now we face the collapse of the criminal justice system and a total breakdown of law and order,” said Mahmood.
It was an apocalyptic vision, as Labour sought to pin the blame on the Tories for underinvestment in the prison system.
As it happened, the justice secretary was correct in her prediction that Britain would soon see mobs “running amok, smashing in windows”. Anti-immigration riots gripped the nation barely a fortnight later, pushing the prisons system to the brink of collapse.
Mahmood pulled the emergency lever of Operation Early Dawn as the rioters bulged the system, and more than 3,000 prisoners were let out in September and October – many of them freed on licence after serving just 40 per cent of their sentences, instead of the usual 50 per cent.
The Labour government promised that none of those released early had been convicted of serious crimes such as terrorism or rape. Yet the political symbolism of freed prisoners celebrating their early release, with some openly thanking ministers, has been hugely damaging for the party.
“Labour could be maximising court capacity and expediting the deportation of foreign criminals,” said the Conservative Party’s shadow justice secretary, Robert Jenrick.
“But instead they are rushing to release prisoners. It’s little wonder career criminals pop champagne and declare that they are now Labour voters for life.”
Capacity problems at British prisons have been a big problem for many years. The Tories under Boris Johnson had promised up to 20,000 new prison places under a £4.5 billion expansion scheme, but with all the money already spent only an extra 6,000 places were delivered.
In December, Mahmood and Labour announced a grand plan to deal with the problem. The government has set aside £10.1 billion to fund a prison building programme. Four new men’s prisons will be built in Yorkshire, Leicestershire, Buckinghamshire and Lancashire.
Planning permission is already in place for all four facilities – they were originally identified as part of the Tory plan that ran out of money – and construction has already started on one of them, HMP Millsike in East Yorkshire. Each of the four new facilities will be built next door to an existing prison.
Along with an extra 1,000 cells to be built in existing prisons, and a further 1,000 of most dilapidated cells being refurbished to prevent them being put out of service on fire safety grounds, the government estimates that capacity will grow to 96,000 by 2031.
Any other new prison facilities will be designated “sites of national importance” under UK planning laws. This will allow them to be pushed through over the heads of local objectors by ministers, led by deputy prime minister Angela Rayner, who is in charge of Britain’s planning system.
Still, it will be nowhere near enough, as Mahmood was forced to admit in a recent round of broadcast interviews. Forecasters in her own department have calculated that the numbers of prisoners could hit 105,000 by 2029, well beyond the ability of even the expanded system to cope.
With the Conservatives and, especially, Reform UK making hay at the expense of the government on law and order grounds, Mahmood appeared to promise that she would make no more early releases. “I want to avoid that,” she said on Sky News, a comment that also appeared to leave her wiggle room.
She has appointed David Gauke, the moderate Tory former justice minister, to lead a review of the crisis facing prisons. Gauke, who served under prime minister Theresa May, has previously argued that prison sentences of under six months are pointless and should be reconsidered.
In yet another signal that the new Labour government might take a different approach to criminal justice, prime minister Keir Starmer appointed businessman James Timpson as his new prisons minister. Timpson, who did not run in July’s election, has been appointed to the House of Lords so that he can join the government.
Timpson previously ran a national key-cutting business that operated under the family name. It was famous for hiring ex-prisoners as acts of rehabilitation. Timpson previously suggested that about a third of prisoners should not be behind bars.
Mahmood has tried to distance herself from the one-third figure. But as the system creaks and groans in the years ahead, she might be forced to take more political risk to stop Britain’s prisons from overflowing.
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