Sentencing policy is based on headlines, not evidence

Every time a government announces early releases, the same thing happens. Within hours a victim of a serious offence is on the airwaves, and nobody explains how the prisons came to be full. The anger is real and deserved. The framing is never tested. So test it.

Almost everything said about ‘soft-touch Britain’ is the reverse of the truth. England and Wales hold 86,536 prisoners, 139 for every 100,000 in the population — the highest incarceration rate in western Europe alongside Scotland. The prison population has risen 94 per cent since 1990. Over the same period the Office for National Statistics records violence down 78 per cent from its 1995 peak, and theft down 77 per cent. We nearly doubled the prison population while crime roughly halved.

We hold 7,202 life sentenced prisoners. The Council of Europe has 53 prison jurisdictions, and setting aside Turkey, the other 51 hold 9,557 between them.

If you release a thousand safely, you get no headline. If you release a thousand and one, and the one reoffends, you get the front page. So the front end never moves: sentences lengthen while release points get shaved to manage overflow.

Watch it work. Parliament voted down the exclusion of serious sexual offences from the Sentencing Act earlier release scheme last October, by 307 votes to 182. Nine months later, after weeks of media coverage, the exclusion was granted. The votes had not changed. The reporting had.

This has to stop. It needs one person prepared to say what every official review has found: that the public were sold safety and handed a warehouse, and that sentencing policy here is written in headlines and ratified afterwards in Parliament.