Also if they are released at 40% early or at 100% completion does anyone actually believe they will be a different person?
It's a legitimate argument: What's the difference whether they get out in 9 months or 19 months? It could be argued that the shorter sentencing won't have that much of an impact because they'll be the same asshole coming out of that prison as they went in, regardless of the time they spent behind bars.
However, what's hard for people who haven't been abused (my ex husband is currently serving a sentence) to understand is that an abuser's time in prison is the victim's justice, and crucially, their time for recovery, rebuilding resilience, making their lives safer. It takes time for a broken soul to mend a broken life. Safety, and future proofing that safety, becomes everything to a recovering victim. And that sentence becomes a victim's vital time frame to work within. You honestly feel pressed for time, this absolute desperation, as the years of that sentence pass, because it takes SO long to get your shit together after you've been abused. You've lost the capacity to make decisions, to trust (yourself, above all). You don't just shake off the abuse and step into a new life with a future ahead. Your past, as an abused woman, isn't yet far enough away. It sits there like a motionless fog over your life for quite a while.
Your abuser may be in prison but you almost end up institutionalised yourself, trapped in the prison of trauma, fuelled by an abuse that's curtailed your growth, your well-being, your sense of freedom, self, joy, and safety for years and years. You have to learn, taking baby steps, to release that abuse to the past.
I feel like I've done time alongside my ex.
I don't think I've recovered at all these past 2 1/2 years.
I've functioned. I've endured. I've moved forward. But I haven't recovered. I am so sad about that, above everything else.
And there is no system in place, there just isn't, that offers the stability and sense of safety victims desperately need once their perpetrator is behind bars. Victim Support is a courtesy call and email. It's useful. It has its place and I am grateful for it. But it's not a lean-to for victims to seek shelter under.
The need to feel some sense of justice is paramount to a victim's recovery. That release date is a crushing blow because it already comes early at present (my ex gets out in 3 weeks. He has served 2 1/2 years. He'll now serve 3 more years out on licence). He's already had a solicitor send across a list of demands to me, including financial ones. He's angry. I put him in prison. He'll never forgive me for that. And he's a vengeful fucker.
The abuse, albeit emotional now, resumes. Even from a distance. And he's not even out of prison yet.
Domestic abuse escalates to femicide too easily. When you confront your abuser and decide to leave your abuser, the danger and risk of death escalates exponentially.
It's very hard, I understand, for several women on this thread to hear someone like me say, "If this early release scheme plays out, Kier Starmer is failing women and children. I am afraid of the consequences of the government's decision, one that I don't think is right."
It's much easier to dehumanise women and children and to intellectualise the debate around releasing dangerous and violent men early than it is to listen to a woman simply say, "I'm afraid and our government is wrong and putting women and children at risk."
And it's really easy to just put the problem of male violence on us women. "Prison's not the be all and end all! Let the women take responsibility! Maybe if you stupid women wouldn't breed with these violent men, the problem would solve itself." Yes, this was pretty much said on this thread. I am paraphrasing but I'm not far off. That mentality is up there with "Maybe if she didn't wear a short skirt she wouldn't have gotten raped."
Well, maybe if more of us started such sentences with 'men should'' instead of 'women should', society could move the needle forward. Because we haven't. We're just stuck. Stop using the word 'women' where the word 'men' needs to be placed.
I am tired. I don't have a solution, of course. But I don't think this scheme is the answer to the prison crisis.
It's just so predictable that cutting corners on the preservation of female safety is the default solution here, as usual. "The women won't mind! They won't even notice it because they embody the short straw."
We've grown so immune to this reality, we don't even notice it happening to us anymore. We'd rather blow smoke up Sir Kier's ass than actually say, "Hang on a minute, our safety is being thrown under the bus here."