When I became Justice Secretary, I was told that our prisons could overflow at any moment.
If that happened, our courts would have ground to a halt. The police would have had to stop making arrests. Law and order would have collapsed.
This was the legacy of the guilty men in the last Tory Government. They brought our prisons to the point of collapse. Rather than deal with their crisis, they ran away and called an election instead. It was a disgraceful dereliction of duty. And it left me with only one option.
From today, some prisoners will be released a few weeks or months early, serving 40 per cent of their sentence behind bars, instead of the usual 50 per cent.
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To protect the public, we’ve excluded a number of offences from this change – including serious violent crimes, sexual offences, and a series of offences linked to domestic violence. We have also put plans in place to monitor those released under strict conditions, like wearing tags and keeping to curfews.
In the weeks since then, our probation officers have gone above and beyond to prepare. I am pleased to say we will shortly bring on 1,000 new officers to support them as they manage offenders in the community.
The hard work of rebuilding our prisons system is not over. We will build the prisons the last Government promised but never delivered. We will also focus on driving down reoffending so prisons stop churning out more hardened crooks and make better citizens instead.
The last Government dodged difficult decisions and left our prisons in crisis. We will do what it takes to rescue and rebuild law and order in our country.