Andy Burnham urged to keep criminals in jail – ‘paedos will never be rehabilitated!’ | Politics | News

Kemi Badenoch said thieves and dangerous drivers should be released from prison before murderers, rapists and pedophiles. Speaking alongside rape victims at an emotional press conference, the Conservative Party leader urged Prime Minister Andy Burnham to avoid the “worst of all options”.

He also said Labor should consider leasing prison space in other countries to ease the crisis of overcrowding behind bars. Ms Badenoch’s intervention came as rape victims revealed in harrowing detail how Labour’s sentencing reforms had robbed them of their “justice” and created a new sense of terror and heartache. Grooming gang survivor Sarah Wilson warned Mr Burnham: “Pedophiles will never be rehabilitated.

“We should exempt all these dangerous criminals. I’d rather have a thief on the street than someone who would rape another child.”

They were among 6,000 to be released from September under current plans.

Carol Higgins, a survivor who was repeatedly raped by her own father, said: “The judge said the depravity of his crimes and the impact they had on me warranted a 20-year sentence.

“He raped me almost every day for over two years and beat and groomed me since I was born, so the sentence doesn’t fully reflect depravity anyway.

“Instead of serving 50 percent of his sentence in prison, he will only serve 33 percent.

“Every minute I spend in prison adds another minute to my fear and anxiety, triggering my complex PTSD.

“I’ll forever look over my shoulder and wonder if he’s there when I step out my door.

“No more innocent children’s lives should be stolen. Reducing the sentence means stealing my justice.”

She added: “They will say my father is an old man and does not pose a risk. He was not an old man when he raped me. He committed the crime. He needs to be punished. Don’t let him out too early.”

Under Labour’s plans, murderers and rapists will be released from prison early, while 43,000 criminals will avoid prison altogether.

Many convicts will be released after serving only one-third of their prison sentence.

Those sentenced to four years or more will be released only after serving 50 percent of their sentence behind bars. The first batch is expected to be released on September 2.

Criminals sentenced to sentences of less than 18 months will be the first to be released this September.

Then the releases will increase month by month. Criminals sentenced to more than 12 years in prison, some of the most dangerous criminals in the country, will begin to be released next June.

The Conservative Party leader said: “We need to build new prison sites more quickly and cheaply. It will cost money, but we also need communities to support the prisons being built around them.”

“One of the things that caused delays was the judicial review of prisons that were not built.

“If everyone says ‘there is no prison near me’, we will not have these built, so this is an issue that the public can help with; let’s build prisons to place these people. We cannot say ‘no’ to every place where a prison is likely to be built.”

Ms Badenoch added: “The second thing we could do a little bit sooner is rent prison places abroad. That’s something we did as a government, we had plans to rent prison places, just like Sweden did with Estonia, so we didn’t have to release these kinds of violent criminals early.”

The party leader also called on the Government to “send foreign criminals to prisons in their own countries” and said the UK should “leave the area”. [European] He described the “Human Rights Convention” as prohibitive regarding deportation.

Justice chiefs fear they will run out of places in November unless urgent action is taken.

Child rape survivor Jade Belgrove said: “We can’t go on like this. We can’t face this trauma every day; it’s exhausting and we’re tired of fighting. We need this resolved and we need it resolved now.”

Marie Stone, who was sexually assaulted by Harry Miah as a child and will be released if her 18-year sentence is reduced to 6 years, said: “We are tired. We are exhausted. I just feel like something needs to be done.”

Ms Stone added: “We’ve had this for life, we’ve had PTSD for life, if anyone knew what that really meant it would devastate us.”

A spokesman for the Ministry of Justice said: “Protecting the public will always be our top priority. That’s why we’re taking decisive action to fix the prison crisis we inherited, while investing record sums to support victims.

“But after 14 years of prison quotas increasing by just 500, we are days away from running out of space in our prisons. This would lead to a complete breakdown of law and order.

“We are using every power to protect the public and reduce crime – building prisons at the fastest pace since Victorian times, introducing the biggest ever expansion of tagging to toughen community sentencing and giving victims a voice in tough licensing conditions for offenders.

“We have paused the changes from September to conduct an urgent review to ensure we are applying this policy correctly for victims to avoid running out of prison space.”