Britain’s prisons are on the brink of running out of space, with the number of spare places falling to just 100, it emerged on Tuesday.
It is the closest the UK has come to running out of cells, as the overcrowding crisis behind bars intensified over the Bank Holiday weekend.
Prime Minister Sir Starmer pledged this week to send fewer people to jail in the long term, as he prepares to oversee the mass early release of prisoners in a bid to tackle the overcrowding crisis impacting UK jails.
A sweeping group of emergency measures is reported to include the automatic release of prisoners on standard determinate sentences after they have served just 40 per cent of their sentence. This is despite the current threshold being 50 per cent, while exemptions are expected to apply for serious violent and sexual offenders.
In comments made to Channel 4 while attending the Nato summit in Washington DC, Sir Keir said he was “shocked” at the scale of the crisis.
“I’m shocked to be in this position, particularly having worked in criminal justice. It is a basic function of government that there should be enough prison places for the number of people that courts are sending to prison. That basic premise broke down under the last government, that is beyond irresponsible, and we’re going to have to pick up that mess and they ignored it,” he told the channel.
“I can’t build a prison in seven days with the best will in the world. It is clearly a problem left by the last government. We cannot be in this terrible state and they ignored the problem, didn’t fix the problem, we are going to have to fix it.”
“We have to make short-term measures that we will announce in due course and then of course we’ll have to do even further measures. I simply can’t build a prison in seven days.”
Since his election as Prime Minister in June, Sir Keir has hinted at plans to send fewer people to prison in the first place, claiming that Britain is “addicted to sentencing and punishment.”
“I spent five years of my life as the chief prosecutor, bringing cases which led to serious criminals going to prison for very long periods of time. In relation to the work that could be done to prevent people going to prison, I have always believed that there are cases which didn’t need to have got to court,” he said recently.
The Labour leader, during the general election campaign, promised to prevent young people from falling into knife crime by establishing youth hubs as part of “an opportunity to pull people out”.
Starmer has been dubbed “two tier Keir” over the policing of widespread riots which spilled across the UK earlier this month, leading to multiple jail sentences. Critics have claimed that right-wing protestors have been dealt with much more harshly than their left-wing counterparts, with Starmer’s tough approach to protestors being called out by tech billionaire Elon Musk.
Critics have hit out at the contrasting approaches to the policing of the Nottingham Carnival weekend – where 61 police officers were arrested and 8 people were stabbed – and those involved in rioting after the fatal stabbings of three children at a dance class in Liverpool earlier this summer.
Commenting on the subsequent riots, Sir Keir admitted on Tuesday that he did not know if the riots would cause the criminal justice system to become overwhelmed.
“Every day of that disorder, literally every day, we had to check the precise number of prison places and where those places were to make sure we could arrest, charge and prosecute people quickly,” he said.
“Not having enough prison places is about as fundamental a failure as you can get and those people throwing rocks, torching cars, making threats, they didn’t just know the system was broken, they were betting on it, gaming it.
“They thought: ‘Ah, they’ll never arrest me and if they do, I won’t be prosecuted, and if I am, I won’t get much of a sentence.’
“They saw the cracks in our society after 14 years of failure and they exploited them. That’s what we’ve inherited. Not just an economic black hole, a societal black hole and that’s why we have to take action and do things differently.”