This prisoner release reveals the idiocy of technocracy

More than 1,700 prisoners are being released early today. By the end of October, prisons in England and Wales are expected to let out as many as 5,500 offenders prematurely, after they have served just 40 per cent of their sentences.

The threat this prisoner release poses to the public is not in any doubt. Martin Jones, the chief inspector of probation, says it is a ‘certainty’ that many of those let out will reoffend. He expects ‘a third’ to commit further crimes. Many will be back in jail within ‘days or weeks’ for breaching their terms.

Some criminals have themselves admitted they’re not ready to be released. A man locked up for ‘punching people in the head’ told journalists at The Times that he had ‘certainly not’ been rehabilitated. ‘I’ll be back’, conceded a shoplifter, who had been jailed more than 50 times.

All this could be especially dangerous for women. According to domestic-abuse commissioner Nicole Jacobs, a ‘high proportion’ of the men leaving prison today will be domestic abusers. These are criminals, as Julie Bindel points out, who likely know where their victims live or work, or where their kids go to school.

The crisis that prompted the Labour government to release so many prisoners is indeed severe. Britain’s jails are dangerously overcrowded and have been approaching breaking point for some time now. Last week, the prison population reached more than 88,500, meaning almost all of the jails for adult males are full. Justice secretary Shabana Mahmood warned of a ‘breakdown of law and order’ if prisoners weren’t released, ‘because courts would not have been able to conduct trials and the police would not have been able to make arrests’. Overcrowding also fuels the risk of prison riots.

Successive governments have shown little interest in ensuring a functional prison system. Labour blames the Tories – with some justification – for today’s prisoner release, having presided over 14 years of a decaying estate. But the last time prisoners were freed on this scale to ease overcrowding was in 2007 – following 10 years of Labour rule and well before the era of Conservative austerity.

Over several decades, capacity has barely expanded, infrastructure has been allowed to rot and staffing has been cut. As Ian Acheson points out in his new book, Screwed, in 1990, at the time of the Strangeways prison riot in Manchester, there were around 20,000 prison staff managing a prison population of 45,000. Today, over 85,000 prisoners are watched over by just 18,000 staff. On current trends, the prison population is projected to rise by about 19,000 by 2028, but capacity is set to rise by just 9,000. New prisons that have been planned have been marred by delays – thanks, in part, to failures to gain planning permission (an illustration, if ever there was one, of the state’s utterly misplaced priorities).

There are important debates society needs to have about the role of prisons in the criminal-justice system. Are we imprisoning too many people for non-violent offences? Are short custodial sentences doing more harm than good? Are we doing enough to rehabilitate offenders? But even if we think there are too many people in prison, that doesn’t make releasing thousands of prisoners at the stroke of the justice minister’s pen any more rational. The length of time someone does or doesn’t spend in prison should be determined by the crime and the laws our elected representatives make – not the capacity in the system at any given time.

Plus, these offenders are being released from crowded prisons into society, where they will be (barely) watched over by an already stretched Probation Service. The dangers of this are obvious – even if many of them would be getting out in a few months’ time anyway.

It’s clear that the prisons crisis is already distorting the workings of the rest of the criminal-justice system. Fearing that prisons could soon become full, the National Police Chiefs’ Council recently told officers to stop making ‘non-priority arrests’ and even to suspend any operations that might trigger ‘large numbers of arrests’. Judges and magistrates have been told to hand out more suspended sentences to avoid prison overcrowding. Offenders are being treated like numbers to be shuffled around on a spreadsheet.

The early release of prisoners is just the latest development in what you might call the decriminalisation of crime. Police failed to solve a single burglary in half of all areas in England in the past three years. In 166 areas of London, not a single ‘neighbourhood crime’ – ie, offences such as phone and bike thefts, burglaries and vehicle crime – was solved by police between 2021 and 2023. The police rarely respond to reports of shoplifting. Criminals who arrive illegally from overseas can easily game the asylum system to avoid deportation. Indeed, the state was already letting criminals roam free before it decided to release thousands of offenders early.

Today’s prisoner release is a stark reminder of the idiocy of technocracy. Politicians of all stripes, and the state they preside over, see every issue not in terms of ideology or their responsibilities to the public or even right and wrong. They are just data points to be managed and short-term crises to be avoided – the human costs and medium-term crises be damned.

When managerialism reigns, we’re all screwed.

Fraser Myers is deputy editor at spiked and host of the spiked podcast. Follow him on X: @FraserMyers.