Labour Accused of “Gambling With Public Safety” as it Unveils Plan to Free Prisoners After Just 40% of Sentence
Labour was accused of taking aĀ “dangerous gamble with public safety” yesterday as the Government unveiled plans to release thousands of prisoners early. The Mail has more.
Justice Secretary Shabana Mahmood announced a series of measures designed to ease overcrowding in jails and avert a “total breakdown of law and order”.
Offenders will be automatically freed after serving 40% of their sentence, rather than the current 50%.Ā
She stressed the rule would not apply to violent offenders serving more than four years, sex offenders or those in prison for crimes connected to domestic abuse. Dangerous offenders serving extended or life sentences would also be exempted from the scheme.
ButĀ Keir Starmer’s new Justice Minister Lord Timpson fuelled fury at the “anti-prison” approach as he suggested that courts should be handing out shorter sentences in the first place.
The peer, a long-time campaigner for reform who has argued that two-thirds of inmates should not be in prison at all, said the authorities should be “less focused on the length of a sentence” and more focused on rehabilitation.Ā Ā
The aunt of Zara Aleena,Ā who was murdered by a man who had been out on licence for nine days, raised concerns that Labour was “gambling with public safety” and convicts will not be “supervised adequately”.
In a speech at HMP Five Wells, in Northamptonshire, Ms. Mahmood said prisons were “on the point of collapse”, with barely 700 places left in the adult male estate and jails operating at 99% capacity since the start of 2023.
If prisons ran out of cell space, she warned, the country faced the prospect of “van-loads of dangerous people circling the country with nowhere to go”, police officers unable to arrest criminals and “looters running amok”.
She said: “In short, if we fail to act now, we face the collapse of the criminal justice system and a total breakdown of law and order.”
Worth reading in full.
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This is the weaponisation of human rights for criminals against ordinary ppl, this is what Blair and co always wanted. I don’t care what conditions are in jail, as long as they are fed and kept dry that’s where our responsibility to criminals ends. The purpose of jails is to keep dangerous ppl off our streets to make us all safer, it’s not to rehabilitate. The fact the so called right has conceded the ludicrous rehabilitation point is just another example of where the so right has failed again as with climate nonsense. Prisons arent about to collapse just put 3 in a cell instead of 2. There I’ve just created 50% more capacity.
Something else I’m curious about: we know about the over-crowded prisons but are there over-crowded psychiatric hospitals? I’m wondering that because, for instance, we know how many of these ( often those with a migrant background ) people guilty of going round stabbing people often play the ‘mental health’ card. Or their lawyers do anyway. So does this mean there’ll now be more pressure on psych hospitals to lock people up, or even also to release people early if they’re also bursting at the seams? Not sure, but they’re really going to have to massage the inevitably worsening crime stats, just like they did the ONS data during the mass jabathon, to try and hide how the trend’s going to move in the wrong direction, and how can it not? What confidence this must give the British public, combined with the ongoing importation of unvetted migrants. Here’s ex-police officer, Norman Brennan sharing his reservations ( 4mins );
”Ex-copper @NormanBrennan
reacts to “Justice” Minister @ShabanaMahmood
releasing thousands of prisoners because prisons are full.
He sees anarchy, & gives society a rest from criminals. It’s to “punish, to deter, reassure”.
“Weak sentencing is tough sentencing on the victims.”
https://x.com/DaveAtherton20/status/1811843436531556567
I wonder if this psycho will end up in a psych ward, pleading ”diminished responsibility”, or will he go to juvenile detention because he’s 17yrs? There was a time when this type of ‘cultural enrichment’ wasn’t commonplace, but now these attacks are 10 a penny;
”A youth, 17, attacked Sikh worshippers with a sword at the Guru Nanak Darbar Gurdwara, in Gravesend, in Kent.
The police were called where he was arrested and charged with attempted murder.”
https://x.com/DaveAtherton20/status/1811835464455979329
<tl:dr: Too many laws, too many unsafe convictions, too many pills, too many delusional fantasists> An obvious step to reduce overcrowding in NHS psychiatric hospitals is to avoid hospitalisation and shorten the period of hospitalisation. There are advantages in this, especially for people whose behaviour before admission was iatrogenic and during hospitalisation was nosocomial, and who recover quickly when returned into supportive family and who avoid re-medication. The flip side is that some of those discharged create problems. Only a small proportion of those discharged kill or injure themselves or others, or were admitted as a result of their carrying out or attempting to carry out such acts. However, many of those discharged nevertheless still have a propensity to delusional thinking, and acting on it as though it is “reality”. Even when this does not reach the extremes of killing or harming themselves (believing that The Planet is Stuffed) or killing or harming others (believing that they are Saving The Planet) such patients can cause havoc. While the more introverted ones merely do not contribute much to society and live as hermits or waifs, the more extroverted ones acquire positions of power, and deploy gaslighting or pseudologia fantastica. These are… Read more Ā»
Thanks for the detailed response. Curious how you know all of this..Do you have some inside knowledge due to your job, for instance?
I had about ten years voluntary work with an NHS Mental Hospital Management Board (as carers’ representative) and a similar period as a court reporter specialising in historical cases of sexual offences, all unreportable publicly. Both unpaid. The latter tend to be extremely formulaic, like an opera plot, and you know how they are going to pan out pretty well from day one. The big unknown is which way the coin will fall in the jury room. What surprised me was the shameless collusion between police and hospitals to trawl for delusional fantasists who could be relied on to come up with some extremely embroidered or totally fanciful stories from decades previously and which could then be used to “corroborate” a narrative of a recent allegation, and even be allegations in their own right. Before Starmer, one criterion before bringing multiple charges based on statistics was three “similar facts” backed up by evidence (e.g. three Brides In The Bath All With Insurance Policies); after Saunders it was “similar allegations” (e.g. a hostile ex girlfriend plus two brain-fried druggies from the local hospital, or one baby with a “diagnosis of exclusion” backed up by statistical allegations both from experts). IMHO the… Read more Ā»
Ah yes, that explains it. Well it does sound like an interesting period in your work history and you obviously gained many valuable insights that most of us wouldn’t be privy to. I always wondered how these historical sexual abuse/rape cases even managed to get to court, given that there’d surely be no documented physical evidence of the alleged crime, so it would presumably just amount to one person’s word against another’s, at the end of the day. Given the seriousness of the alleged crime I just can’t imagine anyone accused being sent down based purely on who can convince the jury they’re telling the truth the most effectively on the day. I’m not insinuating these ‘victims’ are making it all up all of the time but one would assume that before you ruin somebody’s life by sending them to prison you would need to produce irrefutable proof, and surely this is the key ingredient missing when it comes to these ( often decades ago ) historical allegations. And I don’t think somebody’s extensive mental health history can be held up as incontrovertible evidence a crime took place. Then if we take into account the many and varied brain chemistry-altering… Read more Ā»
Agree. The stabbing in Nottingham the lunatic who murdered 3 ppl didn’t even get sent to a high security jail, instead he was guilty of man slaughter.
I read the other day the Tories closed many prisons over their 14 yearsā¦ why would they do this if capacity was an issue, age of facility etc Iād guess but if you are bursting at the seams, and canāt afford to build new, surely youād keep older ones going? (As I type this I realise Iām not applying politician logicā¦.)
There is no point throwing your toys out of the pram. This one is entirely the fault of the Tories.
I partially disagree. Both Labour and Tory have modified legislation in such a way that many previously lawful activities have been criminalised (and vice versa), and the judicial system has been compromised (especially criminal trials and probation services). The overall effect is to create a climate of fear in the populace and the desire to be “saved” from assorted comic-strip monsters by self-appointed super-heroes. Much of the legal fiddling went on around the time of the Starmer/Saunders revolution in the Crown Courts, and the resulting excess convictions that now clog up the prisons. However, I can’t foresee any deep investigation into excess convictions or excess deaths being initiated under Starmer.
“police officers unable to arrest criminals”
When did arresting criminals creep in to their job description?
Are they even allowed to call them criminals? Are they not called something like “Restricted Freedom Persons”?
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ha ha ha ha jeez…………How did we get here? You just gotta love the Americans. At least they know how lock people up. Isn’t it great when you see scum handed down sentences like 40 years 38 years and 25 years to be served————— “consecutively”.
Next will be the gaslighting when criminals with even shorter sentences are more available to victimize citizens: “Look, our statistics show crime is down. Don’t believe your own experiences or those of your neighbors!” This is what’s happening in the US, as 1/3 of jurisdictions don’t report their crime stats to the FBI and the government crows that crime is down, down, down!
Cannot control a border, cannot lock up criminals, cannot stop people knifing each other and on and on and on. Why do we even bother having a government? Oh, I forgot we need them to pretend to save the planet.
I don’t believe any of this.
The real reason Kneel is doing this is because he has been ordered to by his Davos masters, well probably Tony Bliar, and the aim first of all is to sow fear. A few nasty incidents by early release perps, inevitable of course, will provide wonderful headlines for the MSM and help to ramp up the fear. It is all part of the plan to destabilise society and keep people on edge.
It’s the “worse than we thought” excuse again.
“The number of Muslim men in prison has nearly doubled in the past 10 years, making up just under 14,000 of the prison population (15%), a disproportionate number, as Muslim communities make up about 4.5% of the general population in England and Wales.” “The number of BAME people in the youth justice system is now at 50%.” “Amad says some prison officers seemed to be scared of groups of Muslims, especially at Friday prayers.” ppp0066 – Evidence on Prison population 2022: planning for the future (parliament.uk) So Kneeler’s new government appointed a Pakistani Muslim woman to be not only the UK “Justice” Secretary, but also the UK Lord Chancellor, a position which is technically above even the Prime Minister. That new Pakistani Muslim Justice Secretary/Lord Chancellor immediately decided to release thousands of criminals from prison early. It will be interesting to see whether statistics will be released showing further details of these criminals. Remember how the SNP appointed a Pakistani Muslim man (gosh, there’s that same Muslim country popping up yet again in the UK government) as Scotland’s “Justice” Minister, who shoved Sharia Law Hate Speech legislation through the Scottish assembly? Whatever happened to that? So remember, folks, when in doubt, always put a Pakistani… Read more Ā»
Well whoever is in charge of the justice system, the fundamental issue is that for decades (actually more than half a century) weāve been importing some groups who are on average more likely to commit crimes than the population we had say at the end of WW2. Sadly too many of our fellow citizens seem not to realise this or donāt care.
They won’t realise and won’t know as 70% get their news from BBC, and it is kept from them.——–The BBC is not called the British Brainwashing Corporation for nothing
Or perhaps they do realise but donāt want to admit it because āracismā
As an outsider looking in, I really think the UK has lost its collective mind. When did it ever become acceptable to let people out of prison early? Funny how the govt could erect ānightingaleā hospitals in warp speedā¦.that were never used, another big waste of money. But building more prisons to incarcerate criminals, just isnāt top of the list. When a politician or his/her family are victims of an early released criminalā¦..watch the Labour parliament change its tune.
The same Labour party that criticised the Tories for an early release policy. Hypocrisy reigns supreme.
Freedom for criminals? Lockdown for the general population? All appear guilty in the new regime reset.