To think prison reform wasn't the top of most voters agenda?

[malificent7]

I get it is important due to overcrowding but I'm a bit surprised this is one of the first topics in the headlines.
I am all for youth hubs to target knife crime....excellent idea but releasing lots of prisoners who apparently shouldn't be there will give Reform lots of ammunition what do you think?

I think posters just get to a stage where the thread feels done and dusted. And while we wait for further news on who is being released early, and the crimes they were convicted for, there's not much to say.

Originally @verdantverdure , it was the news of James Timpson's appointment, and that there wasn't much mention of prison policy during campaigning. However, anyone reading the papers for the last four or five years is aware of the huge backlog in the MoJ and the courts.

YABU if you think anyone in prison gets rehabilitated.

No they don’t. There has been no money for years. Prisons are vile places. Violent and often dangerous. The officers and the inmates deserve a lot better and so do we; we would have a safer society if we had invested in them instead of relying on “bang ‘‘em up and throw away the key”.

There should be total overhaul of what gets custody. Possession of child abuse material and domestic violence/abuse always should imo.

I'm not giving out any names, but I was told by a rock solid reliable source (and politically neutral) that it was a people-are-going-to-die-if-something-isn't-done level of emergency, so I'm glad someone had the balls to tackle it.

I'm just sick of people moaning about how poorly prisoners are treated. They are there because they broke the law, seriously.

Yeah, didn't the prison governors tell the Tory government that a couple of years ago?

The Tories upping the sentences for a couple of things and making some offences carry mandatory jail time meant just simple maths made this inevitable if nothing was done.

The Tories did too little too late of course and here we are:

If only life were that black and white

So what's acceptably bad treatment for someone who has broken the law then?

How badly do you think someone who has broken the law should be treated?

How unsafe? How unsanitary? How misery inducing? How mental health condition causing? How physical health problem causing?

What do you think prison is supposed to do in society

Just cause suffering?

Blair created more imprisonable offences and more offences generally than in any other period of British history.

just to add, if it’s all of the above. How does that solve the issues that found them in the position where crime felt like the best answer.
does it fix the drug addiction?
does it fix the lack of family support that led them to join a gang?
etc etc

@FinalCeleryScheme

Tony Blair is about six or seven Prime Ministers ago!

The party which was in government up until last week had 14 years to make this situation better or worse.

For most of the 14 years they made it worse.

Then their solution was to release
10,000 prisoners early and to tell the police to avoid arresting criminals!

Blair was the second last Labour PM (ex Starmer). And easily the longest serving one.

I don’t disagree about the need for penal reform. A pp rightly said that this an issue that parties can’t campaign on but must address in office. I absolutely approve of this new government’s announcement. I’ve said so upthread.

But you shouldn’t get away with bullshit about how this is only or mainly the Tories’ fault.

www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/prison-governors-government-riots-jails-management-association-justice-pga-unrest-inmates-officers-wardens-a7872301.html

www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-40798604.amp

howardleague.org/news/revealed-the-scale-of-prison-overcrowding-in-england-and-wales/

assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5b7d27e9e5274a44d7e3f341/prison-population-projections-2018-2023.PDF

The prison population has been rising for at least the last 25 years and yes some of that time was covered by a Labour government,

but 14 years is long enough to do something useful about it @FinalCeleryScheme

assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5b7d27e9e5274a44d7e3f341/prison-population-projections-2018-2023.PDF

I think I would trust Starmer to understand the Courts & Judiciary quite well. The Timpson appointment is good. Shame on the outgoing rabble to allow this mess.

I remember hearing that in the nineteenth century, politicians didn’t necessarily think they had to leave a legacy or achieve anything particular in office. They just had to ‘carry on the work of Her Majesty’s Government’
The last lot failed to even do that. They had fourteen years to build more prisons if their policies demanded them. That’s what government is for.
How can the situation not be their fault?

I think one aspect people aren’t considering when talking about prisons is that anyone with sons, brothers, husbands could find them placed on remand. Many men are remanded into custody and subsequently released when the case is dropped. With the courts backlog you can easily be looking at 12-18 months on remand.

You might think it would never happen to anyone you know, but it can and does every day. I came across a sad case the other day, lad of 18, killed himself in the first couple of days of being remanded. With the offence he was remanded for being relatively minor, in that it wasn’t something like murder or rape or anything like that. I don’t even know if he was guilty. But I do feel for his poor family.

Wouldn’t you want to know that if a loved one of yours found themselves in that situation, that they would be treated like human beings? That they were at least as safe as it’s possible to be in a prison? I read the other day that it’s something like 14% of prisoners are remand cases. So not an insignificant number. They won’t all be guilty. So no, not every prisoner has actually broken the law.

I don’t think the Conservatives did anything worthwhile about penal policy. I’m just pointing out that 13 years of Blair and Brown didn’t either, and in fact made the situation much more difficult for their successors.

I hope Starmer reverses many of the offences created by Blair. These contribute to the criminal courts’ overload and can result in prison sentences. The Tories did some tinkering about that, but not nearly enough.

Some of all the above comments resonate with me. However, crime has changed and is changing (something like 42% is now fraud-related according to Your and Yours on R4) and much of that originates outside the UK, making prison sentences enforceable or appropriate: there's no physical danger from them. White collar crime and theft through fraud is incredibly hard to prosecute across borders but, also according to Y&Yours, there have been several ground breaking pieces of legislation passed under the Tories that should help. These all sound dry and dull so they are unlikely to poll well.

Anyone would want to see a young person from a disadvantaged background helped to get their life back on an even keel through rehabilitation and education so they can start over, but a clever cynical cyber-criminal overseas is a much harder case to crack and punish effectively.

https://inews.co.uk/news/mega-prison-james-cleverly-braintree-2915964

Prison reform is just part of the bigger picture on crime, safety, violence against women, knife crime and lots of other things that are people’s top priority.

Don't get me wrong here. VAWG is something I would always like to see properly punished. Knife crime is tragic too, but why was your child out on the street and vulnerable when it happened instead of being at home with family I know boys want to feel like the big man long before they are capable of fullfilling the role with competence and kindness.

Domestic violence is the driver of crime imo. Most men in prison had violent or otherwise abusive fathers. It is domestic violence and abuse to women and children that ruins our society. Yes there is fraud, economic crime, but murder, child abuse, rape, assault, grevious bodily harm are the result of violent, dysfunctional men and women who are beaten. Personally I think we would have a social revolution if all men who engaged in domestic abuse were sent to prison. There is, like rape, no effective consequences. Labour say they are serious about violence against women and girls (and boys too please!). They should get on and haul these men to prison, and revise the family courts so that domestic abuse of your partner means you don’t see your children. Other countries get this and we don’t. I will judge the Labour Party p this. Men who are domestically violent aren’t doing it out of ignorance. They do it because it works. If it is really unacceptable, not just lip service, then we will stop indulging this male crime, and we will stop pretending that there is some kind of equality between men and women in terms of violence. It’s a lie.

So you'd just lock up a woman who, as a small child was passed around her father's friends to be raped every night, who then turned to drugs as a young teenager to help blot out the memories, and who then ended up in a physically and emotionally abusive relationship and pregnant at 16, who then ended up shoplifting to feed herself and the baby and got caught?

You'd rather lock her up in a prison which is just another hellhole for her, at a cost of £50k plus a year btw, than step in and actually help her get her life back on track would you?

I find that attitude bizarre tbh.

I wouldn't put people in jail for shoplifting, no. At least not just a single instance.