Ministers consider novel solutions to prison crisis

Next week, around 3,000 prisoners in England and Wales will be released early.

Why? In the last week, about 100 sites in the system were close to running out of cells.

For months, the number of prisoners and the number of prison places have remained almost the same – that is, the prisons are full.

The last Conservative government was aware of this problem and tried to relieve the pressure through some emergency measures, including the early release of some prisoners.

There were senior figures in the government at the time who argued that we needed to go further and release more money – and that is exactly what the Labour Party is now planning to do.

But with elections approaching, there was hesitation in taking this step, as even more lenient treatment of criminals, as some believe, would probably not be popular with many voters.

For various reasons, the prisons are quite full.

More and more people are ending up in prison and the average prison sentence is getting longer.

Further information can be found here at the Institute for Government.

In addition, not enough new prisons have been built to accommodate the additional inmates.

Then, due to the pandemic, the number of cases in the crown courts began to pile up.

And then there were the riots this summer.

The new government plans to build more prisons and hopes that by classifying this as a national priority it can overcome the local planning objections that previous proposals have faced.

Others ask a more general question: Are we as a society locking up too many or too few people?

A senior figure told me that it costs on average £49,000 to lock someone up for a year and that each new cell costs on average £600,000.

Starting next week, thousands of criminals who have served 40 percent of their sentences will be able to be released for the first time.

Government sources say that those convicted of serious violent crimes or sexual offenses will not be released early.

And they also hope that, having announced their plans two months ago, they have had the opportunity to prepare the probation service to support those being released.

But a person within the service told me that they were concerned that there were dangerous people on our streets who had no business being there.

To give you an idea of ​​the scale of the challenge here, both the last and the new governments have had discussions with the Estonian government about the idea of ​​exporting prisoners to serve their sentences there.

While this may sound unusual, it would not be an unprecedented process. Other European countries have already adopted similar arrangements whereby prisoners are convicted in one country and imprisoned in another.

The idea was raised again by the Estonian government during a visit by Justice Minister Shabana Mahmood this week.

I am told that both former Conservative ministers and current Labour ministers have independently reached the view that this would be very expensive.

But the fact that the idea was not rejected outright says something about how willing ministers are to consider new possible solutions to the problem they face.