Union warns of probation officer shortage ahead of prisoners’ early releases
Up to 2,000 offenders due to be freed in England and Wales in September after serving 40% of sentence
Ministers will struggle to prepare for next month’s early release of thousands of prisoners, a union has warned, after the latest figures showed a drop in the number of probation officers.
Ministry of Justice data shows there were 178 fewer probation officers over the last quarter, as the service gets ready to monitor another 5,500 prisoners released over the next year despite deepening concerns over increased workloads for staff.
Up to 2,000 prisoners are expected to be released in the second week of September as part of an early release scheme, called SDS40, which will allow many prisoners to walk from prison after serving 40% of their sentences.
A second tranche of up to 1,700 prisoners, all jailed for more than five years, are expected to be freed in late October after the law was changed by the lord chancellor, Shabana Mahmood, to relieve pressure on overcrowded prisons.
A senior official from Napo, the probation officers’ union, said its members were trying to prepare for the early release scheme but the government was unable to maintain staffing levels, let alone recruit more, as required.
“At a time when probation is under even more pressure from workloads in preparation for the SDS40 early release scheme, we now see a drop in staffing numbers. HMPPS [HM Prison and Probation Service] needs to understand why people are leaving, and this will include pay. The crisis in our justice system is a result of years of cuts and the government must take urgent action to invest in the whole system,” Tania Bassett, a Napo national official, said.
According to Bassett, SDS40 requires probation staff to carry out extensive pre-release work. This includes reviewing risk assessments, making referrals to accommodation including probation hostels, carrying out home visits, coordinating with victim liaison officers and domestic abuse support officers and developing robust multi-agency safeguarding plans.
“Doing this work at a time when many staff are on annual leave has put enormous pressure on probation staff. HM Prison and Probation Service has been telling unions that probation will be fully staffed since 2014,” she said.
MoJ figures show there were 5,160 full-time band 4 probation officers in post in June 2024, which is a decrease of 178 compared with March 2024.
Martin Jones, the chief inspector of probation in England and Wales, told the Guardian in July that the current probation model was “not sustainable” and suggested ministers should free up capacity by no longer asking probation officers to monitor 40,000 people released from prison after short custodial sentences for crimes such as shoplifting.
As part of an overview of the probation system, which manages more than 240,000 offenders a year, Jones said each of the service’s 12 regions in England and Wales were already struggling to cope with the number of cases. More than 95% of probation delivery units examined by the watchdog were falling below the standards set for good practice, he said.
The way that offenders are monitored in the community has come under intense scrutiny since the murder of Zara Aleena, a law graduate, in east London in 2022. Her killer, Jordan McSweeney, who had a long history of misogynistic and racially aggravated incidents, should have been seen by probation officers as a high-risk offender and recalled to prison after missing appointments. Instead, he was incorrectly assessed as being of medium risk and remained free to attack Aleena.
That case followed the exposure of failings by the probation service before Damien Bendall murdered three children and his pregnant partner in Derbyshire in 2021.
On Monday, the government said it would launch Operation Early Dawn, a longstanding plan that means defendants waiting for a court appearance can be held in police cells for longer until prison space is available. The emergency scheme has been announced as hundreds of rioters are jailed in the wake of unrest this summer.
The director of public prosecutions has said the criminal justice system requires “considerable investment” as the jailed rioters continue to put pressure on overcrowded prisons.
In a piece for the Times, Stephen Parkinson defended the “brisk” nature of the disorder prosecutions, saying cases such as rape and domestic violence take longer to build and are more “complex”.
A Ministry of Justice spokesperson said: “We inherited a prison system in crisis and have taken difficult but necessary action to make sure we can keep locking up dangerous criminals and protect the public, and since then the Probation Service has been planning for these releases.
“Everyone released will be strictly monitored, face tough licence conditions like electronic tagging and curfews and could be recalled to prison if they breach licence conditions.”
--oo00oo--
Of course building more prisons is not the sustainable answer to the prison crisis. This from the Guardian last week:-
Labour urged to scrap £4bn Tory mega-jails plan and fund rehabilitation
Exclusive: Former chief inspector of prisons Nick Hardwick says money would be better spent preventing crime
Ministers should scrap Conservative plans to build new mega-jails and pour £4bn into the prevention of crime and rehabilitation instead, the former chief inspector of prisons has said.
Nick Hardwick, who is also a former head of the Parole Board, said a huge expansion of the prison system would not solve the problem, especially when average custodial sentences are rising.
Keir Starmer inherited a crisis in the prisons system when he took office, and blamed the previous government for letting prisons operate at 99% capacity for 18 months with a net number of 100 prisoners added every week. He announced an expansion of the Tory scheme of releasing tens of thousands of inmates early to try to prevent jails becoming full.
On top of the early release scheme, Labour has suggested it will keep the Conservatives’ plan to expand the prison system by at least 14,000 places in England and Wales, up from about 89,000 now, including six new prisons, at a cost of £4bn. Planned “super-prisons” in Lancashire, Leicestershire and Buckinghamshire have been hit by delays.
Pressure on prisons has only increased with riots across England this month leading to more than 1,000 arrests. But, in an interview with the Guardian, Hardwick said hugely expanding the prison system was not the solution and that the current size of the incarcerated population was unsustainable.
“The basic problem is that people are coming into the system faster than they are going out. If you think of it like a bath, the bath is overflowing and water is still coming in,” he said.
“The strategy has been up until now – and what Labour is continuing to do – is bail out the bath … That will certainly buy them some time. But it doesn’t solve the problem completely. The system is set to continue to increase.
“Labour have said they were going to spend billions, literally billions, on new prisons. But if they bought themselves a bit of time, would it be better to reinvest that money in trying to stop people going into prison in the first place – working in schools, in health, in mental health?
“You could ask people: do you want people to go to prison for a few months longer at a cost of billions of pounds, or spend that money on hospitals and schools?”
Hardwick said he thought prison was “right for those involved in the riots, and the speed at which this was done – in contrast to how the system usually works – will be a deterrent”.
But he added: “I think the system will cope until [the end of] August provided there are no more crises but in the longer term the current prison population is unsustainable without billions being spent. And even then I don’t think the new places can be delivered in time to deal with the sustained upward pressure in the population.”
Hardwick was chief inspector of prisons from 2010 to 2016 and then head of the Parole Board until 2018. He quit the Parole Board after judges overturned the release of the rapist John Worboys, though Hardwick played no role in the decision.
Hardwick, who was a professor of criminal justice at Royal Holloway, University of London, until last month, said the policy of building more big jails would simply mean prisoners spending a few extra months inside, which was unlikely to act as a deterrent to crime:
“I don’t think it’s a good way to spend money to build big new prisons. We are spending billions on an untested model that we don’t know works. We’ve not run prisons of this size before.
“Even if in the longer run they work, by the nature of these prisons they will have new, inexperienced staff, so you are going to have real problems in some of them, I think. You might want to replace some of the crumbling Victorian ruins. But I think they need to think very carefully about whether they want to invest at this level given how short of money they are and put that money somewhere else.”
The justice secretary, Shabana Mahmood, told the Telegraph in an interview before the election that Labour would build more prisons by prioritising them in the planning system. However, Labour’s manifesto did not commit to a specific number of new prisons or amount of prison places.
Starmer’s government has said solving the prisons crisis is a priority, and appointed James Timpson, a businessman who employs former prisoners, to the role of justice minister. Timpson has previously said that he thinks prison does not work for many people, and that only a third of inmates should really be there.
Victims’ groups have raised concerns about plans to release some prisoners after 40% of their sentences, but Hardwick said this would allow some suspects who are on bail and yet to be convicted to be sentenced and off the streets sooner.
“Mistakes will be made. I’m sure about that, because you’re talking about big numbers and some people will reoffend,” he said. “They will reoffend a bit sooner than they would otherwise have reoffended. But if we leave the system as it is we have no possibility of addressing their behaviour.
“And we are in a position now where, because the prison system is full, you have people on bail accused of domestic violence – who might be innocent – but if they’re guilty we can’t process them quickly enough to reduce the threat because of the problems in the system.
“You have victims waiting for years for the trial and to know what will happen. They can’t sort the backlog unless they sort the prison population out.”
A Ministry of Justice spokesperson said: “This government is committed to addressing the crisis in our prisons, and ensuring our jails make better citizens, not better criminals.
“That has started with the emergency capacity measures introduced by the lord chancellor last month, and we will set out a 10-year strategy for prison supply later this year. We will also introduce a new focus on driving down reoffending, linking up prison governors with local employers to break the cycle of crime.”
Labour urged to scrap £4bn Tory mega-jails plan and fund rehabilitation
Exclusive: Former chief inspector of prisons Nick Hardwick says money would be better spent preventing crime
Ministers should scrap Conservative plans to build new mega-jails and pour £4bn into the prevention of crime and rehabilitation instead, the former chief inspector of prisons has said.
Nick Hardwick, who is also a former head of the Parole Board, said a huge expansion of the prison system would not solve the problem, especially when average custodial sentences are rising.
Keir Starmer inherited a crisis in the prisons system when he took office, and blamed the previous government for letting prisons operate at 99% capacity for 18 months with a net number of 100 prisoners added every week. He announced an expansion of the Tory scheme of releasing tens of thousands of inmates early to try to prevent jails becoming full.
On top of the early release scheme, Labour has suggested it will keep the Conservatives’ plan to expand the prison system by at least 14,000 places in England and Wales, up from about 89,000 now, including six new prisons, at a cost of £4bn. Planned “super-prisons” in Lancashire, Leicestershire and Buckinghamshire have been hit by delays.
Pressure on prisons has only increased with riots across England this month leading to more than 1,000 arrests. But, in an interview with the Guardian, Hardwick said hugely expanding the prison system was not the solution and that the current size of the incarcerated population was unsustainable.
“The basic problem is that people are coming into the system faster than they are going out. If you think of it like a bath, the bath is overflowing and water is still coming in,” he said.
“The strategy has been up until now – and what Labour is continuing to do – is bail out the bath … That will certainly buy them some time. But it doesn’t solve the problem completely. The system is set to continue to increase.
“Labour have said they were going to spend billions, literally billions, on new prisons. But if they bought themselves a bit of time, would it be better to reinvest that money in trying to stop people going into prison in the first place – working in schools, in health, in mental health?
“You could ask people: do you want people to go to prison for a few months longer at a cost of billions of pounds, or spend that money on hospitals and schools?”
Hardwick said he thought prison was “right for those involved in the riots, and the speed at which this was done – in contrast to how the system usually works – will be a deterrent”.
But he added: “I think the system will cope until [the end of] August provided there are no more crises but in the longer term the current prison population is unsustainable without billions being spent. And even then I don’t think the new places can be delivered in time to deal with the sustained upward pressure in the population.”
Hardwick was chief inspector of prisons from 2010 to 2016 and then head of the Parole Board until 2018. He quit the Parole Board after judges overturned the release of the rapist John Worboys, though Hardwick played no role in the decision.
Hardwick, who was a professor of criminal justice at Royal Holloway, University of London, until last month, said the policy of building more big jails would simply mean prisoners spending a few extra months inside, which was unlikely to act as a deterrent to crime:
“I don’t think it’s a good way to spend money to build big new prisons. We are spending billions on an untested model that we don’t know works. We’ve not run prisons of this size before.
“Even if in the longer run they work, by the nature of these prisons they will have new, inexperienced staff, so you are going to have real problems in some of them, I think. You might want to replace some of the crumbling Victorian ruins. But I think they need to think very carefully about whether they want to invest at this level given how short of money they are and put that money somewhere else.”
The justice secretary, Shabana Mahmood, told the Telegraph in an interview before the election that Labour would build more prisons by prioritising them in the planning system. However, Labour’s manifesto did not commit to a specific number of new prisons or amount of prison places.
Starmer’s government has said solving the prisons crisis is a priority, and appointed James Timpson, a businessman who employs former prisoners, to the role of justice minister. Timpson has previously said that he thinks prison does not work for many people, and that only a third of inmates should really be there.
Victims’ groups have raised concerns about plans to release some prisoners after 40% of their sentences, but Hardwick said this would allow some suspects who are on bail and yet to be convicted to be sentenced and off the streets sooner.
“Mistakes will be made. I’m sure about that, because you’re talking about big numbers and some people will reoffend,” he said. “They will reoffend a bit sooner than they would otherwise have reoffended. But if we leave the system as it is we have no possibility of addressing their behaviour.
“And we are in a position now where, because the prison system is full, you have people on bail accused of domestic violence – who might be innocent – but if they’re guilty we can’t process them quickly enough to reduce the threat because of the problems in the system.
“You have victims waiting for years for the trial and to know what will happen. They can’t sort the backlog unless they sort the prison population out.”
A Ministry of Justice spokesperson said: “This government is committed to addressing the crisis in our prisons, and ensuring our jails make better citizens, not better criminals.
“That has started with the emergency capacity measures introduced by the lord chancellor last month, and we will set out a 10-year strategy for prison supply later this year. We will also introduce a new focus on driving down reoffending, linking up prison governors with local employers to break the cycle of crime.”
