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Emergency actions on British prisons crisis

The British Government has announced that it will lower the automatic release point for certain custodial sentences, in a bid to stop what it called “the impending collapse of the criminal-justice system”.

The Law Society Gazette of England and Wales said that the move to address a capacity crisis in the country’s prisons had been widely expected.

Lord chancellor Shabana Mahmood stressed that the “emergency measure” would not be a permanent change.

The Ministry of Justice said that the End of Custody Supervised Licence scheme, which was introduced last October and saw prisoners initially released 18 days early, would end.

Some offences excluded

However, the proportion of certain custodial sentences served in prison will be reduced from the current 50% to 40%, with certain safeguards and exemptions.

Sentences for serious violent offences of at least four years and sex offences will be excluded. Offenders for crimes connected to domestic abuse, such as stalking, and controlling and coercive behaviour, will not be released earlier.

The changes will come into force in September.

‘Pragmatic’

Mahmood said that if prisons were to run out of places, courts would be forced to delay sending offenders to jail and police would be unable to arrest dangerous criminals.

“There is now only one way to avert disaster. I do not choose to do this because I want to ... but we are taking every protection that is available to us,” she added.

The Gazette quoted the president of the Law Society of England and Wales Nick Emmerson as saying that Mahmood had acted “pragmatically and decisively” to tackle a crisis that she had inherited