Robert Jenrick has posted to X pointing out many of Labour's future plans for reduced sentencing and early prisoner releases.
To govern is to choose.
There are 10,350 foreign criminals in our jails.
17,000 people are awaiting trial.
Instead of reducing those numbers, Labour have decided to let out criminals who reoffend early.
They’re siding with criminals over the public.
Labour’s Justice Secretary, Shabana Mahmood, has chosen to put the public at risk rather than deporting the foreign criminals who are clogging up our prisons.
The first thing Labour did when they came into office was change the law, so prisoners only had to serve 40% of their sentence.
That’s been a disaster. In April a violent offender killed a father-of-one just hours after being released from prison under the Government's early release scheme.
Today Labour have announced that if you’ve been sentenced to 4 years or less, and breach your early release conditions, you’ll only have to serve 28 days in prison.
When questioned, the Justice Secretary could only say that sex offenders would be excluded.
That’s an invitation for dangerous criminals to cause carnage.
What does that mean in practice?
A man could be convicted for ‘grievous bodily harm with intent’ after stabbing someone. The starting point for an offence like this is 6 years – but if they lodge an early guilty plea, that could come down to 4 years.
Under Labour’s early release scheme, they only need to serve 40% of that sentence. They’ll be out on license in less than 2 years.
At this point they might breach their conditions by contacting the victim or reoffending.
Under Labour’s new rules, instead of being recalled to serve the rest of their sentence, they’ll be given a fixed-term recall of a pitiful 28 days. They are then released, with no reassessment of risk or parole board oversight.
That is not justice. It’s a recipe for the breakdown of law and order.
By telling prisoners that they will never serve their full sentence, even if they reoffend, the Justice Secretary has removed an important deterrent.
I don’t pretend that the prison crisis happened overnight. My party did not build enough prisons. No government in recent decades has. We are now under new leadership.
But Labour are making this problem so much worse.
1 in 5 prisoners are in prison on bail awaiting trial. In 2019 that figure was 1 in 8. If the Government were able to increase court capacity radically – as the judiciary has called for, time and time again – then that figure could be reduced dramatically, freeing up spaces. But under Shabana Mahmood the court backlog has grown and the remand population in prison has risen.
She refused to take the judiciary up on their offer of extra court sitting days. As a result it is not uncommon for as many as half of the courts at the Old Bailey to sit empty.
Labour have been in power for nearly a year now. The only thing that they have to show for it is:
- accidentally letting out dozens of dangerous prisoners out early;
- failing to tag offenders leaving prisons for months on end;
- spiralling violence against prison officers;
- 60% sentence discounts for offenders; and,
- cutting the capital spending budget for new prisons.
In two weeks’ time Labour even look set to scrap prison sentences for all but the most serious crimes.
The only people benefiting from this Labour Government are illegal migrants and hardened criminals.
https://twitter.com/RobertJenrick/status/1922674696400617737
