Wednesday briefing: Why the prison crisis is about much more than early release | Prisons and probation

Good morning. On his family holiday last week, the prime minister, Andy Burnham, was reported to be taking daily calls from Ministry of Justice officials about his government’s early release scheme. A furious public outcry has gathered pace since it emerged that the plan – brought in by his predecessor, Keir Starmer, to alleviate overcrowding in prisons across England and Wales – might include two of the killers of PC Andrew Harper and other serious sexual offenders, including grooming gang perpetrators.

After several weeks of “system says no” briefings, which Harper’s mother Debbie Adlam has described as “a rollercoaster … really draining”, yesterday Burnham endeavoured to put a pin in it until September.

Announcing that he had tasked the justice secretary, Alex Norris, with fast-tracking measures to free up prison space, the prime minister insisted he was “increasingly confident” that the early release scheme can be adapted to exclude the constable’s killers. He had previously intervened to exempt grooming gang members, rapists and those convicted of “serious” child sexual offences.

Norris will report to parliament early next month, and Burnham is no doubt keen that this week’s nationwide listening tour is not derailed by constant questions about early release. But the scrutiny is unlikely to recede with opposition parties calling for a U-turn and probation officers yesterday voting decisively in favour of strike action over excessive workloads – a problem they expect to get worse when the scheme starts in the autumn.

For today’s newsletter, I spoke to criminal justice consultant and former repeat offender Gethin Jones, and former prison governor John Podmore, about the story missing from the early release row, and what a radical solution to the ongoing prison capacity crisis might look like. First, this morning’s headlines.

Five big stories

1. UK news | Repeated debilitating heatwaves this summer are likely to have cost the UK economy more than £4bn in lost economic output by the end of July, new analysis shows.

2. Meta | Courts in England and Wales have joined a number of restaurants, theatres and pubs in banning the controversial Meta glasses, which can record video footage while being worn.

3. Middle East | Firefighters and residents of south Lebanon have accused the Israeli military of lighting wildfires in the region, as forested areas burned down in blazes sparked by Israeli bombing.

4. UK politics | Reform’s deputy leader Richard Tice has been accused of using “nasty tactics” in an attempt to intimidate journalists and deflect attention from his own financial affairs after issuing a legal threat to the Guardian.

5. US news | Democrats called on Tuesday for a congressional briefing over a stunning charade in which Donald Trump was secretly spirited to a different plane than the one the public and press believed he was travelling on.

In depth: ‘We should be locking up people we’re afraid of, not people we’re mad at’

Gethin Jones recalls watching a documentary about HMP Strangeways, the crumbling Victorian prison in Manchester that became synonymous with over-crowding and brutal conditions. The Strangeways riot of 1990 was a watershed moment in British penal history, leading to long-awaited public scrutiny and reform.

While the echoes of those days are all too apparent, what he recalls most clearly was the then-governor describing prison as “society’s dustbin”.

At that point, Jones was already set in his own 20-year cycle of drug misuse and offending: after a childhood in care, he received his first custodial sentence at the age of 14, and was introduced to heroin and crack cocaine in prison.

He’s now a passionate advocate for the type of “human to human” intervention that eventually unlocked his own offending cycle – working with men in secure environments.

“Politicians keep saying we lock people up to keep communities safe,” he says. “But the reality is that when you lock somebody up, if you do nothing with them while they’re in prison, and nothing to support them when they get out, they’re even more disadvantaged and more likely to reoffend, which is now making our communities unsafe.”

The current row over early release is focused on a small percentage of offenders, he argues, while most of those in prison are low risk, high need. “They are people with poor mental health, substance misuse, no opportunities: all of these areas that our society doesn’t know how to manage, then they fall into the justice system and then they go into the dustbin, which is prison.”

Why are our prisons at capacity?

According to the most recent Ministry of Justice data, there are 86,536 men and women in prison custody in England and Wales, one of the highest per capita prison populations in western Europe.

It’s a population that has doubled in recent decades – from about 44,000 in 1993 – for a number of interlocking reasons. The hefty courts backlog and wider system gridlock brought about by the pandemic has seen the remand population balloon to more than 15,000, almost 18% of the total in custody.

Recalls – the term for people returned to prison after breaching the conditions of their release – have likewise increased by a staggering amount. There were 51,419 licence recalls in England and Wales in year ending March 2026, compared with 40,259 the previous year. Many experts see this as a direct consequence of previous early release schemes: without proper planning, the policy creates a revolving door. Others blame the risk aversion of an over-burdened probation service.

Jones is working with a young man who is about to be released from prison for the second time, having been recalled a mere six days after a drug relapse meant he failed to report to his probation hostel in time. “He’s just about to get out now, and there’s still not the support in place. It will be an absolute miracle if he doesn’t get recalled again.”

Added to this mix is the fact that judges are imposing ever-longer prison sentences – from an average of 16 months for an indictable offence to 1993 to 22.2 months in 2024. When he was asked to review sentencing by Keir Starmer, former Conservative justice secretary David Gauke attributed it to a “bidding war” between political parties since the 1990s over which can show themselves tougher on crime.

And overseeing all of this is another revolving door: that of the entrance to the Ministry of Justice. In the past 10 years, there have been 10 justice secretaries and 13 prison ministers.

What is the cost of early release?

Regardless of sentence inflation, and unhappily for politicians, the public believe prisons are failing to punish prisoners for their offences and not preparing them adequately for a life beyond crime.

What is unclear is how aware they are of the administrative sleight of hand whereby successive governments have driven up sentence lengths through legislation, then sought to undo the effect through early release schemes.

Richard Garside, director of the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies, has written powerfully about the impact on individual victims: “What should not survive indefinitely is the current arrangement, in which parliament promises punishment that cannot be delivered, and the gap is closed administratively, out of sight, until a letter lands on a victim’s doormat.”

In a Facebook post on Tuesday, the prime minister acknowledged “the anguish of [PC Andrew Harper’s] family and, more broadly, of all those victims and their families who may see those who caused them such harm not serve their full sentence”.

But the operational impact is significant. Prison Service leaders are described as “terrified of another exemption” to early release as they cope with severe over-crowding, and must now navigate the haphazard system of sentence discounts and days added in order to determine who is eligible. Previous schemes resulted in some prisoners being released in error, while probation managers found their caseloads distended overnight.

What could Andy Burnham do differently?

In the same Facebook post, Burnham said these exemptions could be mitigated by expanding prison places in three ways: removing foreign offenders more quickly; tackling “the long-running injustice of IPP sentences”, which have kept many minor offenders locked up for decades; and re-purposing some women’s prisons for male offenders. Our home affairs editor Rajeev Syal assesses their viability here.

John Podmore, former governor of Belmarsh, Brixton and Swaleside prisons, has argued consistently that prisons not only fail to rehabilitate, but in too many cases actively institutionalise despair.

The longer-term solution to the present crisis is not, he tells me, to build more prison places – despite Burnham’s colleagues pushing this line yesterday.

Podmore has always made a clear distinction between those who threaten the public – probably fewer than 30,000 of the current population, by his informed estimate – and the rest: “We should be locking up people we’re afraid of, not people who we’re mad at.”

The government is pressing ahead with its aim to build 14,000 more prison places by 2031, mainly secure category B and C facilities – but a good proportion of the prisoner population is within 12 months of release. “We don’t need those levels of security,” Podmore says. “We need more open prisons in urban areas, more approved premises, more bail hostels.”

Female prisoners – the vast majority of whom are nonviolent offenders – are in particular need of more creative facilities like Hope Street in Southampton, which offers a community alternative to prison for women so their children can remain with them.

For Podmore, Burnham’s devolution agenda offers a gateway to radical prison reform: a centrally run federal estate for those who require long-term high security; and oversight of prisons for lesser offenders – who have been thoroughly risk assessed – passed to local mayors.

After all, as Gethin Jones has already explained, lack of resettlement support is one of the biggest hurdles facing newly released prisoners. Aren’t local authorities better placed to bring them into existing housing, education and mental health networks? Might a truly local prison have a board of governors, like a school, making its management answerable to that community?

When Podmore took over HMP Brixton in 2003, it was languishing at the bottom of performance league tables, with angry headlines demanding its closure. He opened the doors, inviting in local community charities and religious groups. “And the response was, ‘What can we do?’ That’s where you change the public perception.”

What else we’ve been enjoying

• I spent half my holiday sharing a cottage with a wasp nest, and was glad to read in the latest instalment of Invertebrate of the Year that my policy of non-engagement was the correct one, definitively settling an argument with my other half. Libby

• Josh Halliday’s piece about Matilda Davis, a mother who took her own life after she was “pushed to breaking point” by a care system that fails the parents of so many disabled children, was a moving profile of a remarkable woman. Hettie

• The forecast cloud cover over Glasgow suggests that solar eclipse viewing won’t be that fruitful, but I was still happy to watch our snappy public service video about how to watch it safely. Libby

• Anthony Bourdain was the world’s first real food influencer who taught us all to avoid brunch like the plague. Zoe Williams spoke to chefs about whether they still admire his hedonistic vibe. Hettie

• ICYMI, you must make time to read this brilliant and disturbing essay from Katherine Rundell about how AI stands between children and their potential for thinking. I finished it feeling angry – but also, hopeful. Hettie

Sport

European Athletics Championships | Britain’s Romell Glave won a stunning gold in the men’s 100m at the European championships, with his teammate Jeremiah Azu picking up silver.

Football | England defender Djed Spence nears Tottenham Hotspurs exit, with the club allowing him to join Inter in a move expected to cost around £25.6m.

Fifa | Gianni Infantino’s opponents are working together to produce a new framework for running world football to replace what they regard as a system of patronage that Fifa has adopted since he replaced Sepp Blatter as president 10 years ago.

The front pages

“Burnham plan to keep PC’s killers in jail could backfire, warn unions”, is the Guardian’s front page today. The Telegraph says “Police unite to fight early release”, the Express has “Andy U-turns on early release plan”, and the Times writes “Extra safeguards needed for early release, say police”.

The FT has “European car industry wary as China tightens grip on component suppliers”, the i Paper has “Summer 2026 will be UK’s hottest since records began”, and the Mail writes “Burnham” Middle-class areas must take more migrants”. Lastly, Metro leads on “The Black Wednesday shopping scramble!”.

Today in Focus

Could Clacton bin off Nigel Farage?

Nigel Farage has taken a high risk gamble by resigning and forcing a byelection in his constituency. Nosheen Iqbal heads to Clacton to find out how voters feel.

Cartoon of the day | Nicola Jennings

The Upside

A bit of good news to remind you that the world’s not all bad

Caspian tigers were last sighted in Kazakhstan more than 70 years ago. Earlier this month, a female Amur tiger, a breed whose DNA is virtually identical to Caspians, was released into a nature reserve in Kazakhstan as part of a pioneering repopulation programme.

“Umit,” which translates to “hope” in Kazakh, was transported to the reserve from the far east of Russia, and soon, she will be joined by more big cats. “There is a lot of work ahead on monitoring tigers and forming a stable population, but today the first and very important step has been taken,” said Kazakhstan’s environment minister.

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Bored at work?

And finally, the Guardian’s puzzles are here to keep you entertained throughout the day. Until tomorrow.