A plan will be made to deal with overcrowding in jails

The Justice Secretary is to unveil upcoming plans to tackle prison overcrowding in England and Wales, which could see prisons overflowing the box within weeks.

Shabana Mahmood has said that situational measures are necessary to “bring the justice system back from the brink of complete collapse”.

The plan is expected to release some prisoners early, the BBC reported on Thursday.

Prisoners serving “standard determinate sentences” are expected to be exonerated when they have served 40% of their sentence instead of 50%.

In March, the next Justice Secretary Alex Chalk introduced a plan to exonerate some prisoners two months early.

However Mr Chalk, who lost his seat in the general election, told the Today podcast that there were also plans to go ahead and reduce some prisoners by 40% of their sentences – as announced today – and to reduce network There is also a plan to send him to jail. First playground.

BBC News understands that several Conservative cabinet ministers supported the theory.

However Rishi Sunak refused to sign it and an election was called before the issue could be resolved.

Brand new Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer said prison conditions were “shocking” and reaffirmed the former government’s “gross irresponsibility”.

Speaking during an information conference at the NATO summit in Washington, he said his labor management “has to take it up and we have to fix it”.

Requesting a question regarding the announcement of prisons at the height, Sir Keir said: “We have, and we will soon have, far more prisoners than we have prison space for.

“You will have ample playgrounds for your prisoners whom the judge is sending to jail.”

To run smoothly, the prison system needs 1,425 free cells in men’s prisons, but media reports suggest only 700 spaces are currently available.

The situation is so severe that “the criminal justice system is on the verge of collapse” resulting in “we are running out of space”, a former prison governor has told the BBC.

Mark Icke, who was governor of HM Prison Swaleside until 10 weeks ago, told the Today program that the crisis is “unprecedented” and that prison governors “have been warning for some time” that “we have too many prisoners in our system.”

Mr Ike is now vice-chairman of the Prison Governors’ Association (PGA), which welcomed the announcement and called for a “full review”, saying “the public should never be put in this position again”.

Asked whether releasing up to 40% of prisoners after serving 50% of their sentence was a necessary measure, Mr Ike said, “We have no choice” and so it was “the right thing to do for now ”

The latest figures show 83,380 prisoners are being held in adult male properties these days and Mr Icke believes the plans will “release 8 to 10,000 people” to “give us some relief”.

Asked whether violent prisoners could be exonerated under the plan, he said, “We are yet to hear the details”.

However he said he believed the federal government had “listened to the advice given to them” so “serious violent offenders, those convicted of sexual offenses and anything related to domestic violence should be excluded”.

On the other hand, the aunt of slain regulation graduate Zara Alina has termed the plans as a “dangerous gamble with public safety”.

Ms Alina was murdered by Jordan McSweeney nine days earlier, after which he had been acquitted of prison and was in the process of being recalled after his license was revoked for failing to meet with probation officers. was given.

His aunt Farah Naz told BBC Breakfast that low funding in the probation service, which oversees prisoners when they are released from prison midway through a sentence on license, means criminals like McSweeney are not being properly monitored in the family .

“That’s what happened in our situation,” she said. “This was a man who was courageous because he was not monitored. It was not evaluated. He was constantly allowed to do what he wanted to do.”

Rory Stewart, a former Conservative prison minister who planned to abolish short sentences, said the prison crisis was an “absolute disgrace” and that one solution was to “put less people in prison for less time”. .

The focus should be on those who have committed “really scary crimes”, he advised BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, and that imprisoning the community for minor offenses is “complete madness”.

He said: “We have to be more patient in explaining that many of the people who are in prison today should not be in prison – and putting them in prison actually puts the public at risk because it destroys their lives. and makes them more likely to offend.”

The Justice Ministry is already constructing six ancient prisons to develop more than 20,000 playgrounds as demand for the mobile fields increases, partly due to the executive’s drive to hire 20,000 additional policemen.

About 6,000 fields were built and about 10,000 will be built by the end of 2025.