Why Are Tories Blaming Labour For Prison Overcrowding?

Step right up, STEP RIGHT UP! To the Great British Decline that people keep telling me is 100% not British decline. From ADHD kids being "over-diagnosed" to benefit cuts to pension changes...

It's definitely NOT that things are getting shitter. Everything's just right-sizing. Cutting waste. Efficiency.

And what could be MORE efficient than solving the prisons overcrowding crisis than just letting a bunch of prisoners out?

Because yes people... from today, England and Wales begin another phase of early prisoner releases, with eligible offenders able to leave jail early - most of them having served just a third of their sentence. This is under the the UK Government’s new "progression model". Progression. Does it feel like progress to you? Or decline? Maybe it's efficiency. I honestly don't fucking know anymore. But i'd hedge that if there's a judicial concept that gets the curtain twitchers of the Home Counties calling up Vine and banging on about "this is why we need Capital Punishment I'm sorry but we do, Jeremy!" - I do wonder if it's progress it'll ultimately achieve.

The Ministry of Justice says the changes are necessary to create capacity in an overcrowded prison system. Well, okay? But are we not clumsily overlooking the concept of "Nighting-jails", lads? #hereToHelp

I read earlier that around 700 prisoners are expected to be released on the first day, seven hundred! With further releases continuing into 2027. Danny Tommo's going to be livid. That's 66% fewer days cut off from his Crowdfund campaign.

Satire aside, this feels like robbing Peter to pay Paul a bit. I mean, YES, you get a bit of space in HMP. But it's already been estimated that half a billion quid will need to be spent managing the early exits (licence breaches, recalls, safeguardian concerns, probation). I'm not a treasury buff but i can't help wondering if you could've rented out a few Travellodges or HMOs for that.

Of course... the background to this isn't lost on me. The how did we get here?

This isn't really a story about prisoners suddenly becoming too numerous. It's a story about a criminal justice system that has been allowed to become a sort of bureaucratic Jenga tower, with successive governments pulling out whichever block is cheapest and hoping nobody notices the whole thing is leaning at 45 degrees.

Prisons are full.

Courts are struggling with backlogs.

Probation is under pressure.

Police forces are being told to absorb additional demand.

All of that is (or is a sympton of) Tory Austerity.

And yet it will be gleefully re-framed by the Right-wing press as a Labour failure. "Labour are soft on crime", "Burnham's Suicidal Empathy For Sex Offenders", "Labour Let TWICE The Number Of Crims Free Than Last 3 Tory Govts Combined" etc etc.

Indeed everything in conservative mindsets seems to happen in a black hole of contextless incompetence. Tories didn't set the stage for all of this! It was Labour who just ad-hoc, randomly decided to let a load of them out. How fun, erratic and entertaining life must be when you have no cause to the effects and around every corner is another unpredictable flash or explosion or riot. Perhaps the knowledge of knowing you will never look back at the substance of matters is a future-you gift? And it allows you to live more in the moment, equally erratically/irresponsibly - with as little acknowledgement of any repercussions.

Present You gets to misbehave while future you remains uninterested in how those behaviours caused the later issues. And you can remain resolutely off the hook for as long as Present You and Future You never meet. Which they show little interest in doing. And who could blame them. I dont particularly want to meet either one of you either.

I digress...

The Government's own latest post-prison accommodation statistics cover more than 95,000 cases in 2025/26. They've explicitly committed to reducing the proportion of prison leavers who are homeless on their first night out. Which is good. "Congratulations, your sentence is over, here's the pavement" is not generally regarded as the gold standard of first world rehabilitation. But that's more money.

Socially, in reverse, Nacro has just published analysis showing that around half of people sleeping rough in England have previously spent time in prison. It says people who have spent time in jail are 40 times more likely to experience rough sleeping than those who haven't.

This matters because there is a deeply stupid temptation in political debate to imagine prison as a warehouse.

Person commits crime → put person in warehouse → wait → remove person from warehouse → problem solved.

Except people are not patio furniture.

If you release somebody with no stable accommodation, no job, broken relationships, addiction problems or whatever combination of personal disasters helped bring them into the criminal justice system in the first place, you haven't necessarily rehabilitated them. You just kept them off the streets for a bit.

And if they end up committing another offence, we fein surprise that they just can't get their shit together, what is wrong with them?! etc

But here's where it gets particularly interesting:

Because although this particular emergency release scheme applies to England and Wales, Scotland has been wrestling with much the same problem.

The Scottish prison population reached a record 8,603 in May this year, against an estate designed for around 7,805 people. The Scottish Government has already used emergency early release measures and changed the release point for some short-term prisoners.

And apparently that wasn't enough.

Scottish Government projections published in July put the possible prison population in March 2027 somewhere between 8,100 and 9,150, depending on how things develop. The modelling says the population is likely to increase. You dont need to do a Govt white paper to work out why (people are getting broker, food is getting expensive, the deterrent effect of jail wears off when you advertise that there's No Room At The Inn)

Scotland is therefore considering more fundamental sentencing reform, including reducing the use of short prison sentences.

Which sounds suspiciously like the sort of thing that might have been worth thinking about before everyone was standing around counting mattresses.

This is the bit that gets lost in the endless political shouting about whether we are being "soft on crime".

Nobody sensible is suggesting that people who commit serious offences should simply be given a commemorative badge to say they were at The Battle Of Balaclavas 2026 or told to try harder to be a good boy.

The question is whether prison is always the most effective way of dealing with every offence, particularly short sentences, particularly non-violent crimes; when the prison estate is already bursting and short custodial sentences can do little to address the underlying causes of offending.

That's a policy question. But it's one that should've BEEN ASKED BY THE FUCKING TORIES YEARS AGO.

And it certainly won't be solved now by whichever politician can shout "TOUGH ON CRIME" loudest while wanking over a Union Jack.