Jim Chimirie 🇬🇧@JChimirie66677
Ten Thousand Foreign Criminals. Not One Deported. Instead, They're Releasing the Rapists.
From September, killers, rapists and sex offenders will walk free from British prisons ahead of schedule. David Lammy, the Justice Secretary, is implementing changes that will see criminals convicted of manslaughter, rape, GBH and sex offences released halfway through their sentences rather than at the two-thirds point they currently serve. A rapist jailed for fifteen years will be out in seven and a half. The Ministry of Justice declines to give a total figure, but it is understood that between five and seven thousand prisoners will be affected in the first year alone.
The Government's justification is prison overcrowding. It is the only justification they have, and they repeat it with the confidence of people who believe the question ends there. It does not.
There are 10,772 foreign nationals currently held in British prisons. They represent twelve per cent of the total prison population. The largest single group is Albanian, at 1,193 prisoners. Polish, Romanian, Irish and Lithuanian nationals follow. Under existing law, every foreign national sentenced to twelve months or more is subject to automatic deportation unless they fall within defined exceptions. Automatic. That is the word the statute uses. It is not the word that describes the reality.
Before a single British victim receives a letter informing them that the person who destroyed their life is being released years ahead of schedule, the Government owes the country an answer to a simple question. Why are ten thousand foreign nationals still here?
Deporting them requires no new legislation. It requires no sentencing reform. It does not require writing to rape victims to tell them their attacker is coming home. It requires the political will to enforce the law that Parliament already passed. Labour does not have it, and they would prefer you did not notice.
The President of the Prison Governors Association, Tom Wheatley, has been characteristically direct. Once the Ministry of Justice begins writing to victims, he said, there will inevitably be individuals who have suffered at the hands of an offender who will become very upset. They will have been expecting the person to be in prison for a much longer period. They are going to be out in weeks. He added the point that distinguishes this from previous early release schemes: this is a statutory change, so it does not matter what you have been sentenced for.
That last sentence deserves to sit in the open air for a moment. It does not matter what you have been sentenced for.
The shadow justice secretary Nick Timothy called the scheme reckless, an insult to victims and a threat to the public. He is right on all three counts. But the political opposition, however justified, risks obscuring the more fundamental charge. This is not a government that ran out of options. This is a government that looked at its options and chose the one that puts rapists back on the street rather than the one that puts foreign criminals on a plane.
Ministers will tell you that every prisoner freed early will be tagged, that sentence extensions are available for bad behaviour, that probation is being expanded. These are the arguments of people managing a catastrophe they created, not preventing one.
The victims who will receive those letters in the coming weeks did not create this catastrophe. They did not vote for it. They were not consulted. A rape victim who built her sense of safety around a release date will now be told, by letter, that the calculation has changed.
Labour inherited a prison overcrowding crisis. They had choices about how to solve it. Ten thousand foreign criminals sit in British jails, deportable under existing law, at a cost of over fifty thousand pounds each per year. Labour chose to free the rapists instead.
"This is a government that looked at its options and chose the one that puts rapists back on the street"
