Police forces in England have started to report re-arrests among prisoners who left jail early under the Sentencing Act. The scheme aims to ease overcrowding in prisons.
In ‘tranche one’, around 700 prisoners left custody early on 1 October. A further 650 or so followed last week in ‘tranche two’.
Arrests within days
Greater Manchester saw 50 people released in tranche one. Greater Manchester Police said officers arrested eight of them within days of their release. Five faced arrest for breaching criminal orders, one of them a domestic abuse prevention order. Police held the other three on suspicion of robbery, drug offences and domestic violence.
Humberside saw 74 early releases in tranche one. Humberside Police said three of those people, a woman and two men, were back in prison. Their alleged offences included burglary, fraud by false representation, and being drunk and disorderly.
A week after the first releases, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Sir Mark Rowley, spoke on the LBC programme ‘Call the Commissioner’. He said his force had seen a sharp rise in licence recalls linked to the scheme. He claimed that 100 people had already faced recall in the first seven days for breaking tagging rules.
Police leaders have complained that they have received no extra money to handle the effects of the early releases.
Case of a ‘high-risk offender’
Media attention fell on one man, assessed as a ‘high-risk offender’, who spoke to journalists and posed for photographs as he walked out of HMP Wandsworth on 1 October. Asked whether he had a message for the Prime Minister, Andy Burnham, he replied: “Keep the early release going. It’s good.”
Within 24 hours, CCTV cameras caught him stealing from two supermarkets in north-west London. He allegedly went into a Sainsbury’s Local in Willesden three times between 6pm and 8.45pm, despite a criminal behaviour order that bars him from the shop. Following his arrest, he reportedly pleaded guilty to four shoplifting offences at Tesco in Wembley between 1 October and 5 October. He had taken laundry detergent worth £142.35 in total.
Reports also suggested that police charged him with a commercial burglary and with breaching court orders before he returned to prison. His ‘high-risk’ label relates to his repeated shoplifting, not to any danger he poses to the public. Without the scheme, he would have left prison within weeks of 1 October anyway.
Officers reportedly spent a whole day finding him and returning him to custody, where they say he needs constant observation. He has since pleaded guilty and is back in jail. The Probation Service also recalled him to prison.
The charity Revolving Doors said the real question was why the man had not received help to stop offending. Instead, it said, the system kept sending him back to prison only to release him again so that the cycle continued.
Responding to the police comments, the Ministry of Justice said: “We inherited a prison system on the brink of collapse. If we had failed to act, the police would have been forced to halt arrests”.
