Labour to set prisoners free as jails will be full within months

Justice Secretary Shabana Mahmood gave a Downing Street briefing warning that by November there will be “no spare cells” as prisons are running at 99% capacity.

Mahmood said at the briefing “to set out the scale of the crisis” the prison service is facing.

The biggest problem facing prisons is that prisoners are being recalled back for a variety of reasons, said the director general chief executive at the service Amy Rees

Rees said, “The total prison population is 88,087 and the adult male estate is operating at approximately 99% of its capacity every year.

“On our current trajectory, the prison population rises by 3,000, and now we expect to hit zero capacity, to entirely run out of prison places for adult men, in November of this year.”

The prison population is rising by 3,000 each year, “the equivalent of two large prisons every single year”, Rees continued.

She added: “Even with these measures in place, we will run out of prison places in just five months time.”

The chairman of the Prison Officers Association (POA) Mark Fairhurst said, “The Government would be better off spending billions of taxpayers’ money on modernising the prison estate, funding an under-resourced probation service, providing more secure mental health beds and ensuring we have robust community sentences that the public have confidence in.

“Building new prisons will take years and will not improve the current population crisis…If new prisons are to be built, I hope the Labour Party’s commitment to the biggest insourcing in a generation is applied and the new build prisons remain in the public sector.”

Robert Jenrick wrote on social media, “To govern is to choose. There are 10,350 foreign criminals in our jails. 17,000 people are awaiting trial.

“Instead of reducing those numbers, Labour have decided to let out criminals who reoffend early.

“They’re siding with criminals over the public. Labour’s Justice Secretary, Shabana Mahmood, has chosen to put the public at risk rather than deporting the foreign criminals who are clogging up our prisons.”