Prison sentences under a year to be scrapped for most criminals
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Prison sentences of less than a year will be scrapped for most criminals under government plans to tackle the prison overcrowding crisis.
Alex Chalk, the Justice Secretary, announced on Monday there will be a new legal presumption that offenders facing jail sentences of under 12 months will instead be “punished” in the community by doing unpaid work such as “cleaning up our neighbourhoods and scrubbing graffiti off walls”.
They will be fitted with electronic, GPS, alcohol or drug tags and placed under curfews of up to 20 hours a day at weekends. Any repeat offender breaching their suspended sentence will be returned to court where they will face having to serve the full term in a prison.
Mr Chalk has stopped short of a “ban” on one-year sentences – as proposed by his predecessor David Gauke – but it is expected to cover most of the 37,000 offenders jailed each year for 12 months or less. It will include burglars, thieves, shoplifters, drug dealers and drink drivers but exclude criminals convicted of any sex, violent or terror offences.
In a statement to the Commons, the Justice Secretary also confirmed hundreds of prisoners will be freed up to 18 days before their scheduled release date halfway through their sentence. It will be targeted at the most overcrowded jails with the first eligible prisoners expected to be out by the end of the week.
The moves have been forced on the Government after jails in England and Wales ran out of space. Last week, the prison population hit a record high of 88,225 with just 557 places left across all 120 jails in England and Wales. It beat the previous record of 88,179 after the riots in 2011.
Mr Chalk said it was an opportunity to reform the penal system by locking up the most dangerous offenders for longer but ensuring more lower-level offenders got tough community sentences which, evidence showed, cut the reoffending rate by more than half to around 22 per cent.
“The taxpayer should not be forking out for a system which risks further criminalising offenders, and trapping them in a merry-go-round of short sentences,” Mr Chalk told MPs.
He said the number of GPS tags will be doubled to 1,000 to track offenders in the community but warned that prolific offenders who were “unable or unwilling to comply” would continue to face the “full force of our justice system”. “For some offenders, the proper sanction is, I’m afraid, the clang of the prison gate,” he said.
The early release scheme for serving prisoners will be similar to one run by the Labour government in 2007, the last time the jails overflowed, but more tightly controlled. Anyone serving a life sentence, extended determinate sentence, or jailed for a serious violent, terror or sexual offence will be excluded. Some violent offenders could be released early if they are serving less than four years in jail.
They will be under licence that could require an electronic tag, restrictions on contacting named individuals, living at a prescribed address, attending appointments and conditions on entering certain postcode areas.
“Breach of these conditions could lead to the offender being recalled to custody – for the entire second half of their sentence,” said Mr Chalk.
He confirmed that the Government would also introduce measures to reduce the 10,500 foreign prisoners, including transferring them back to their home country 18 months instead of 12 months before the end of their sentence and deporting low-level offenders to their home nation rather than jailing them in the UK.
Mr Chalk said he would also consider giving suspects more incentives to plead guilty by offering them more than a third off their sentences if they admitted their offence “at the first opportunity”. The aim is to reduce the record 15,000 prisoners held on remand, a sixth of the prison population and up 6,000 on pre-pandemic levels.
He promised a review of the use of recall to jail for offenders on release who infringe the terms of their licence, effectively reducing the time at which they are at risk of being sent back to jail.
He is also drawing up plans that would halve the period in which offenders sentenced under the controversial Imprisonment for Public Protection (IPP) regime can be recalled to prison. He described IPP sentences – where offenders face potentially unlimited sentences – as a “stain on our justice system”.
The Government has pledged £4 billion to build 20,000 new cells by the mid-2020s to help cope with an anticipated rise in the prison population to around 106,000 by 2027. However, fewer than half of these places will have been delivered by March 2025.
Yesterday, Mr Chalk announced an extra £400 million for 800 new cells, backed up by £30m to identify new sites for jails. Plans for three new mega-prisons in Lancashire, Leicestershire and Buckinghamshire are in limbo, mired in planning objections by local councils, MPs and residents.
The Justice Secretary will also be required every year to explain how his department will meet the demand for prison places. This will include the impact of measures like Monday’s announcement that all rapists will be required to serve their full sentence, without any chance of parole.
Since the summer, judges have already been sparing offenders jail because of the overcrowded conditions. Yesterday, a gang caught in a sting trying to sell a stolen £2m Chinese Ming Dynasty vase to undercover police were told they will serve less jail time because of overcrowding.
A judge sentencing the trio at Southwark Crown Court said each will serve six months less because of conditions inside HMP Wandsworth.
Reforming way we use prisons is right thing to do
By Damian Hinds
Over the last 13 years, this Conservative Government has prioritised public protection above all else. You only have to look at our record to see that being tough on crime is in our DNA.
Since 2010, we’ve cut violent crime by almost half. The most dangerous criminals are being locked up for longer. Average sentences are up, and we’ve scrapped halfway release for the most serious offences, so that these criminals must serve at least two-thirds of their overall sentence behind bars.
This summer, the Prime Minister announced that we were extending the use of whole life orders, so that in more cases depraved sexual and sadistic murderers will die in jail. And yesterday in Parliament, Justice Secretary Alex Chalk set out how we will go even further, ensuring that vile rapists serve their full custodial term in prison.
But as a responsible government, if we are going to continue to put the worst offenders away for longer, we must think again about how we make the best use of our prisons.
That’s why we’ve set out plans to reform the way we use prisons because it’s the right thing to do for the British public.
As prisons minister, I see so much of what prisons do well. But put simply, short prison sentences generally don’t work.
Like putting a plaster on a deep wound, they might hide the problem temporarily, but they don’t heal it. In reality, short prison sentences often store up trouble for the future – failing to tackle the root causes of crime and perpetuating its destructive cycle.
Because putting someone behind bars for a few weeks or months leaves little time to turn a life around. Rehabilitation is critical, but instead, lower risk offenders on short stints in jail can end up trapped in cycles of crime and become hardened criminals themselves.
Often, that’s because they are drug or alcohol addicted or have mental health problems – or a combination of the two. Short prison sentences amplify these problems, with offenders losing their homes, breaking contact with support networks, and crucially, being locked up with other criminals who can steer them in the wrong direction.
When they leave the prison gates a short time later, they all too often fall back into offending – sometimes committing more serious crimes – fuelled by the addictions or mental health issues that haven’t been addressed.
There are alternatives to custody for these kinds of offenders. Instead of going to prison, they can be punished in the community, repaying their debt to society by cleaning up our neighbourhoods and scrubbing graffiti off walls.
There is plenty of evidence that this can be a much better way of dealing with lower-risk offenders. While the overall adult reoffending rate is 25 per cent, for those on sentences under 12 months it rockets to over 50 per cent.
All that achieves is a revolving door in and out of our prisons – and more misery for our communities.
Not only that, prison costs money. Society doesn’t just suffer the crime, it pays the price of bed and board for every prisoner in our jails – to the tune of about £47,000 a year for each adult male prisoner.
In this country we lock up more people per capita than any other country in western Europe, and at a time when our prisons are fuller than ever – we have to have a grown-up conversation about what prison is really for – and follow the evidence about what works.
That’s why we are introducing a presumption that all custodial sentences of less than 12 months in prison will be suspended, and offenders will be punished in the community instead – repaying their debt to society by cleaning up our neighbourhoods and scrubbing graffiti off walls.
Thanks to advances in technology like hi-tech GPS tags, it’s now much easier to supervise offenders in communities so they don’t lose homes, jobs, and family connections – all things that help to keep them on the straight and narrow.
And through robust community sentences – with mandatory drug and alcohol treatment – we can address the root causes of offending so that offenders turn their backs on crime for good.
There are no two ways about it: for those who blight communities and shatter lives, the punishment must fit the crime. The British public expects no less.
This is about public protection at both ends of the spectrum. It’s absolutely right that we lock up the most dangerous criminal for longer. But we must also make sure that the prison system doesn’t further criminalise the redeemable.
These are tough decisions, but this is a government that isn’t afraid to take them, for the future of our justice system, and the good of the British public.
Damian Hinds is the Prisons and Probation Minister and Member of Parliament for East Hampshire
