Hardened criminals with more than 100 previous convictions are being spared jail as Britain’s overcrowded prisons reach ‘breaking point’.
The number of career criminals avoiding jail for their offences has nearly tripled from 1,289 in 2007 to 3,325 in 2023, Ministry of Justice data shows.
In more than 4,000 cases since 2007, offenders have avoided prison, as revealed by The Telegraph last night.
revealed last month that as many as three in five prisons are now overcrowded, with prison governors fearing they will soon run out of space.
In the wake of the recent riots and the promise of swift justice for offenders, Home Secretary Yvette Cooper has warned that soft justice has led many to feel ‘crime has no consequences’ – vowing to tackle the crisis.
Labour has been accused of taking a ‘dangerous gamble’ with plans to release prisoners early in a bid to manage the overcrowding problem, however.
Under new plans, offenders will be automatically freed after serving just 40 per cent of their sentence, rather than the current 50 per cent.
Justice Secretary Shabana Mahmood said the measures were designed to ease the pressure on full jails and avert a ‘total breakdown of law and order’.
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.
The early release scheme is due to run for at least 18 months, with the first batch of prisoners freed in September.
Under the plans, far-right rioters could also be released early, in spite of the government’s hard stance against violent disorder in the wake of the Southport stabbings.
Rioters sentenced last week all received less than the four year cap, meaning they may too be eligible for the release after serving 40 per cent of their sentence.
A rioter locked up for three years this week will have already served 40 per cent of their sentence in around 14 months time.
Met Police Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley previously said around 70 per cent of those arrested at a protest in Whitehall had prior convictions, including for weapon possession, violence and other serious offences.
Neil O’Brien, former Tory minister and MP for Harborough, Oadby and Wigston, told The Telegraph: ‘Most people would expect that sentence lengths would massively increase if you were being convicted for the umpteenth time but instead sentencing gets weaker for those with many previous convictions – the ‘more crime less time’ effect.
‘Too many people in the criminal justice system are obsessed with community sentences and modish ideas, but the evidence is that jailing the small number of super-prolific offenders who commit an outsized proportion of crime for longer is an effective way to make the public safer.’
A Ministry of Justice source told that there would be further exemptions to the early release programme, including those found guilty of arson or terrorism – which some rioters could be charged with.
Ms Mahmood announced last week that an extra 500 prison places would be introduced to house rioters, and has blamed the previous Government for leaving prisons overcrowded and ‘at the brink of collapse’.
In June, under the Tory government, a leaked report concluded the UK would run out of space to house prisoners by 2025 with a shortfall of 2,300 cells on the exiting path.
‘The March 2022 demand and supply forecast shows that, assuming all current planned capacity projects are delivered on time… there will be a capacity gap of 2,300 by March 2025,’ the memo posted on the MoJ website read.
The Ministry swiftly removed the two-page report from its website after being asked about it by Inside Time, the UK’s prison newspaper.
A spokesman said it was an ‘internal, draft document that is over a year old, was not cleared and was published in error’.