New rules set out for foreign criminals

Allowing low-level offenders to avoid jail and deporting foreign criminals earlier are among government plans aimed at tackling severe overcrowding in prisons in England and Wales.

Figures from earlier this year revealed that 61% of prisons were overcrowded.

The justice secretary is due to set out details of his plan for easing pressure in Parliament on Monday afternoon.

Alex Chalk has already said he wants some offenders to do community work rather than short stints in prison.

Writing in the Sunday Telegraph over the weekend, he said: “A short stretch of a few months inside isn’t enough time to rehabilitate criminals, but is more than enough to dislocate them from the family, work and home connections that keep them from crime.

“This is the wrong use of our prison system and taxpayers’ money. It doesn’t deliver for victims and it doesn’t cut crime.”

Instead, he said he wanted judges to make criminals “repay their debt to society” through activities including cleaning neighbourhoods and scrubbing graffiti off walls.

In addition to reducing prison time for some offenders, Mr Chalk said he wanted serious offenders to be kept in jail for longer, with rapists being made to spend the entirety of their sentence in prison.

The government has also announced its intention to free up prison spaces by deporting foreign criminals earlier.

There are 10,500 foreign offenders in prisons in England and Wales. Under current rules, they can be sent home up to a year before the end of their sentence.

New plans would see more caseworkers deployed to speed up removals, allowing criminals to be removed up to six-months earlier.

“It’s right that foreign criminals are punished but it cannot be right that some are sat in prison costing taxpayers £47,000 a year when they could be deported,” Mr Chalk said.

The government also says it would introduce a law to allow prisoners to be held overseas, a move that the government said follows steps taken by Belgium and Norway.

Labour said the plans were “half-baked” and “a huge admission of failure”.

Shadow justice secretary Shabana Mahmood said Labour would recruit “1,000 more staff to a new returns unit in the Home Office, funded by ending the use of costly hotels to house asylum seekers, currently costing the taxpayer £8m a day”.

The Lib Dem’s Home Affairs spokesperson, Alistair Carmichael said: “A merry-go-round of inexperienced justice ministers have made up prison policy on the fly for far too long – our prison system is in crisis and in desperate need of real reform, not the confusion, gimmicks and reheated policies that have already failed on offer from Alex Chalk.”

Ministers have been under pressure to relieve a nearly full prison system.

The system’s total capacity is 88,782, while the current prison population is 88,225 – that means prisons are about 500 places away from reaching full capacity.

The prison population has increased by 7,000 over the past year – an increase of 8%. It is projected to rise to 94,400 by March 2025.

The state of prisons in England and Wales was thrown into the spotlight last month when a man was charged with escaping from Wandsworth Prison.

A report by the Independent Monitoring Board said the prison was “unsafe and inhumane”.

The watchdog also raised concern about overcrowding, noting that in two wings there were 11 shower stalls for 265 men.

Various factors have contributed to prison overcrowding in England and Wales.

The court backlog grew during the pandemic and was made worse by the long-running criminal barristers’ strike in 2022. There are currently 65,000 serious criminal cases in the backlog – nearly double the number before the pandemic.

As the court backlog grew, so did the number of prisoners on remand awaiting trial, which had reached 15,500 people by June 2023.

In addition, the proportion of sentenced prisoners serving sentences of four years or more has gone up to 56% from 40% a decade ago.

To ease the overcrowding, the government said in 2021 it would build 20,000 more prison places by 2025. Only 5,500 additional prison places had opened by October 2023.

— Reports /TrainViral/