Releasing prisoners early is a dangerous business for any government. Not only is it likely to lead to more crime (and indeed, it already is), but those crimes can be traced directly back to ministers in a way others cannot. If anyone released early goes on to do something truly terrible, it could get very difficult indeed for Labour.
In the aftermath of the riots, Sir Keir Starmer has (as on so many issues) tried to paint the problem as one he inherited from the Conservatives. In the short term, this is true: between 2010 and July’s election the Tories shut plenty of prisons, and ducked completely the challenge of providing additional capacity.
But such excuses last only so long. It’s one thing to blame the previous government for not building enough prisons if you’re cracking on with building them yourself; if it looks instead as if your government is just not keen on putting people away (most of the time, that is), the picture is very different.
Here, Labour is pulled in two different directions. On the one hand, it is adjusting planning rules to make prisons easier to build as essential infrastructure (although this does not guarantee they will find the will or capital to build any).
On the other, Starmer made a point of appointing a Prisons Minister who is a committed, and vocal, opponent of incarceration. James Timpson has been described as ‘one of the most progressive ministers ever serving in the role’; he is on record as saying that only one third of the current prison population belongs inside, and that the UK is ‘addicted to punishment’.
If true, this would certainly present the Government with a handy get-out from the shortage of cells. But it isn’t. As David Green has persuasively argued, Britain’s incarceration rate is simply an artefact of our being a high-crime society:
‘In 2023 offenders with more than 75 previous convictions were given non-custodial sentences in 59 per cent of cases; taking a lower threshold, those with 26 or more previous convictions received non-custodial sentences in 61 per cent of cases.
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‘Even if we narrow our focus down to the main violent crimes (violence against the person, sexual offences, and robbery) then 30 per cent of offenders with over 75 convictions received non-custodial sentences; and if we consider those with 26 or more previous convictions, 33 per cent received non-custodial sentences.’
A country which hands down non-custodial sentences to serial offenders is many things, but it is not noticeable enthusiastic about imprisoning people. Indeed, this norm is deeply counter-productive: as a small percentage of people commit a wildly disproportionate share of crime, reliably jailing persistent offenders would have an outsize effect on the crime rate.
The problem is, such a strategy involves handing down long sentences to serial offenders, even if they have committed only so-called ‘low-level’ crime. The central point isn’t rehabilitation – although that is important – but simply keeping them off the streets.
(One area where Timpson definitely has a point is his claim that the middle third ‘probably shouldn’t be there but need some other kind of state support, a lot have massive mental health issues’. It’s still verboten to say so in the sector, but in large part our current prison population is an artefact of previous governments closing asylums and day hospitals, leaving people who can’t live independently to eventually wash up in jail. Labour seems unlikely to pursue this.)
Timpson isn’t in charge of sentencing, of course. But even if the Home Secretary adopts a hard-line approach, the split in attitudes risks exacerbating the problems already created by separating the Ministry of Justice from the Home Office, i.e. the people who run prisons from the people who fill them.
But what about rehabilitation? This is where Timpson has made a name for himself, after all: his company makes a point of employing ex-offenders, and seems to make a pretty good job of it. Even the toughest law-and-order enthusiast must welcome this; if we’re going to let people out, it if far better that ex-convicts are reformed, and equipped and supported to succeed.
Again, however, there’s a problem. While the Timpson company’s work with former prisoners is undeniably impressive, it is not at all obvious that it’s scalable.
In his Channel 4 interview, the Minister explains that not only did he exclude sex offenders, people with substance abuse issues, and ‘people who just haven’t come to the end of their criminal life’, but also any men under 25, because they’re ‘not mature enough’. Timpson is also ruthless about getting rid of difficult staff (whom the Minister calls ‘drongos’).
That’s their prerogative as a private company, of course. But the net result is that whilst ex-cons make up around 10% of Timpson’s staff, that only amounts to somewhere north of 600 people – and that from a policy explicitly based on taking the cream of the crop.
As the minister, however, Lord Timpson won’t have that freedom. Setting aside his infantilising view of young men (who in his lifetime would have been leaving school at 15 and been working for a decade by 25, many married with children), a national rehabilitation policy cannot exclude huge swathes of the current prison population – especially if the aim is to let a third of it out.
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