UK's new justice secretary set to outline emergency measures on prison overcrowding

LONDON -- Britain’s new justice secretary on Friday outlined emergency plans to relieve prison overcrowding, clearing the way for early release of thousands of prisoners to ensure the beleaguered system continues to function.

Shabana Mahmood, who took over after the left-leaning Labour Party's election victory earlier this month, argued that the situation had become so dire that there was only one way to "avert disaster.'' The temporary fix includes reducing the amount of time a prisoner must serve before being automatically released.

“If we fail to act now, we face the collapse of the criminal justice system," she said in a statement. "And a total breakdown of law and order.”

Prisons in England and Wales are simply running out of room. Former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak's government also tried to release some prisoners early, and use police cells for overflow, but it wasn't enough.

The prison population has doubled over the past 30 years despite a fall in crime rates, the Institute for Government think tank said in a recent report. That is being driven in part by the fact that longer sentences are being handed out amid pressure to be tough on crime.

The Ministry of Justice’s latest weekly figures on the prison population stands at 87,505 and is projected to hit 99,300 by the end of next year.

"Even with new prisons being built, capacity is not expected to grow anything like that fast: Only around 4,400 new spaces are planned — but this is against an estimated 12,000 more prisoners,'' the think tank said.

If no cells are available, then police would have to use their cells for prison overflow, Mahmood said. Soon, courts would be unable to hold trials.

“With officers unable to act, criminals could do whatever they want, without consequence," she said. “We could see looters running amok, smashing in windows, robbing shops and setting neighborhoods alight.”

The changes will not apply to some of the most serious crimes, such as serious violent offenses and sex offenses.

But families of crime victims expressed outrage at the new proposals, together with concerns that the newly released prisoners would not be properly supervised.

The aunt of Zara Aleena, who was murdered by a man who had been recently released from prison, described the changes as “a dangerous gamble with public safety” if the probation service is unable to cope.

“If the system cannot deal with those people being released into the community, then those people are not going to be supervised adequately,'' Farah Naz told the BBC. “And when people, perpetrators, even thieves are not supervised adequately, crime can escalate. It doesn’t always escalate, but it can."

The new prisons minister, James Timpson, appealed for a public debate on the length of jail sentences and argued there should be more focus on programs in prison that would rehabilitate inmates, such as training, education or therapy to overcome addiction.

“The question over our prisons is this: are they simply to be warehouses for the incorrigible or become greenhouses for the redeemable?” he told the BBC.

Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who was formerly the head of the U.K.'s Crown Prosecution Service, told reporters in Washington at the NATO conference that the incoming Labour Party government was aware of the looming problem but had been taken aback by the scale of the issue.

“And the nature of the problem is pretty unforgivable in my book, having worked in criminal justice, to have allowed your criminal justice system to get to a state where you simply haven’t got the prison places for prisoners," he said. “This is a predictable problem — it’s shocking."