Labour has just lost the next election – that’s what the prisoner releases have achieved
Labour’s downfall has already been set in motion. Punishing pensioners to reward train drivers was bad. Promising during the election that there would be no additional tax rises was worse. But what will finish this administration was its decision to release violent criminals, even as people were being sent to jail for saying nasty things online.
Every crime will now trigger memories of freed convicts spraying champagne and promising to vote Labour. The BBC might not replay the footage, but voters will in their minds.
Seventeen hundred inmates were returned to the streets last week. One man, according to court documents, committed a sexual assault on the day of his release. Another 1,700 will be let out on Tuesday, and tens of thousands more by the end of next year.
Labour’s excuse for this criminal bonanza is the same as for its tax rises and its pension cuts: “The horrid Tories made us do it.” But voters aren’t falling for it. The two most recent polls show Labour’s lead down to 4 per cent – an extraordinarily sudden collapse for a party which, 10 weeks ago, won a 411-seat majority.
People see Labour making unforced choices. It chose to give public sector unions unconditional pay rises. It chose to cancel North Sea drilling licences. It chose to impose new burdens on employers. It chose to order a woke new national curriculum. And, yes, it chose to decant selected scoundrels back into society.
The man Starmer has brought in to run prisons, James Timpson, makes no secret of his view that there are too many people inside. “We’re addicted to punishment,” he told Channel 4 News. “So many of the people in prison in my view shouldn’t be there.”
This view, widely shared by penologists, Home Office functionaries and Blobsters, is impossible to reconcile with the data. But before we come to that, let’s consider the politics of what has happened.
Rather than admitting that it had a doctrinal dislike of incarceration, Labour claimed that the issue was lack of space. Almost the first thing that Starmer said on becoming Prime Minister was that he would have to release convicts to ease overcrowding.
If he had wanted to, he could have ordered the construction of new prisons and told governors to convert common spaces to accommodation or double up more cells.
Given the speed with which we built the Nightingale hospitals in the early stages of the pandemic, we could surely have thrown up temporary structures while pushing ahead with something more permanent. If money is the issue, we could sell Wormwood Scrubs, which occupies prime development land next to Hammersmith Hospital, and use the proceeds to build larger facilities outside London.
But that was never Sir Keir’s agenda. He seems to share Lord Timpson’s view that many of the people in prison shouldn’t be there. Blaming the Tories must have seemed a delicious bonus.
This viewpoint didn’t seem so clever when various ruffians began rioting. And it seemed downright dishonest when some of those ruffians were then given lengthy jail terms, cheered on by Labour MPs, even while violent offenders were being discharged.
Labour’s reaction to the post-Southport violence has made a mockery of its justification for early release. The country has seen that, when it wants to, the Government is perfectly able to accelerate sentencing and give malefactors long stretches.
At the same time, the Blob’s insistence that prison doesn’t work has been exposed as performative. If Lefties truly thought that chokey was pointless, they would not demand the incarceration of people they dislike – in this case, racists. Economists call it “revealed preference”: the difference between what we tell ourselves we think, and what our actions show.
Last week, in a twist that might have come straight out of a Carry On film, the police and crime minister, Dame Diana Johnson, had had her purse stolen while she was addressing the Police Superintendents’ Association in Kenilworth.
What do you suppose Dame Diana’s first thought was when she realised what had happened? Was it “I pity whoever was driven to do this by years of Tory austerity”? Or might she fleetingly have wondered whether putting more thieves behind bars would reduce theft?
If she did, she would have been right. The decline in crime, especially violent crime, since the 1990s owes a great deal to taking persistent offenders out of circulation.
People tend to assume that crime is on the rise. Their perception rests partly on negativity bias, and partly on the spread of smartphone footage, which can create the impression of a society sliding into disorder.
But the data tell a different story. Whether we use the measure of police reports or public experience, violent crimes, burglaries and homicides have fallen sharply over the past three decades.
As usual, there is more than one factor at work. Many electronic appliances now have “find me” functions, making them risky to steal. Shops and businesses use CCTV. People carry less cash. Alcohol consumption has fallen.
Even changing demographics may have played a part. Although black people are arrested 2.2 times as frequently as white people, Britons of Indian, East Asian and Middle Eastern backgrounds have lower arrest rates than the national average.
But we can’t ignore the impact of incarceration. Michael Howard, who became Home Secretary in 1993, was convinced that, since most crimes were committed by a small number of people, imprisoning those people would cause crime to fall.
Liberal lawyers saw him as a class traitor, and he was excoriated by judges, criminologists and Home Office grandees; but he was proved right. Incarceration rates rose by around 75 per cent over the next two decades, and crime consequently plummeted. When Labour took over in 1997, David Blunkett, a sensible man and a no-nonsense Home Secretary, saw no reason to reverse a successful policy.
Neither did the Cameron government after 2010. Nick Herbert, its first criminal justice minister, had intended to start by releasing the petty criminals and licence-fee defaulters who, he had been assured, were clogging up the system. But he found that there were no such people.
Prisons were full of hardened professionals who, on release, would go straight back to work. Herbert concluded that they had to be kept in for longer – even if that meant building more facilities to accommodate Britain’s growing prison population.
The statistics bear him out. Consider what you need to do to get yourself locked up in this country. Last year, 59 per cent of offenders with more than 75 previous convictions were given non-custodial sentences. Even if we look at violent crimes (assault, robbery and sexual offences), 30 per cent of offenders with more than 75 convictions escaped prison.
Letting out those determined enough to have got themselves jailed drives up crime rates, as almost every study confirms. When the economist Steven Levitt studied the impact of early release in the US, he found that, for every prisoner let out prematurely, there were 15 serious crimes.
How are people going to react when such crimes are committed in Britain by beneficiaries of Labour’s scheme? Will they blame the last government? Or will they think back to the champagne being sprayed about outside HMP Wandsworth last week?
Will they recall Djaber Benallaoua, a 20-year-old drug dealer, exulting as he walked out of HMP Isis that Starmer’s decision had made him a “lifelong Labour voter”? Will they remember Daniel Rutuls, who had been sentenced to three years for aggravated burglary, telling the PM, “Thank you, it’s a smart decision”?
No amount of bluster can hide the truth. Labour politicians have chosen to reverse a policy that had worked
for three decades. They don’t know it yet, but the prisoner releases have done for them.