Number of spare places in men’s jails in Britain fell below 1000 last week

The number of spare places in men’s prisons in the UK fell below 1000 last week as the jail population headed towards peaks seen last summer. Photo / Getty Images

Prisons will run out of space by next March unless ministers scrap thousands of short sentences and release offenders earlier, internal Ministry of Justice forecasts in the United Kingdom show.

MoJ sources told the Telegraph that prison capacity would be “back to zero” by then without the changes, which will see prisoners released as little as a third of the way through their sentences.

Jail terms of under a year will be scrapped for tens of thousands of offenders including shoplifters, drug dealers, and violent thugs.

The number of spare places in men’s prisons fell below 1000 last week as the jail population headed towards peaks seen last summer when Shabana Mahmood, the Justice Secretary, was forced to introduce an early release scheme freeing prisoners 40% of the way through their sentences rather than 50%.

The new measures will include a a Texas-style earned release scheme under which offenders including burglars, thieves, fraudsters and people convicted of assault will be freed as little as a third of the way through their sentence if they behave well and engage with rehabilitative schemes.

More serious sexual and violent offenders will be freed halfway through their sentences rather than two-thirds if they engage with rehabilitative schemes and obey prison rules.

Judges will also be placed under a new legal presumption to not jail lower-level offenders for sentences shorter than 12 months unless there are “exceptional reasons” for doing so.

The maximum length of suspended sentences will also be extended from two to three years so that more serious offenders can be punished in the community, with the threat of recall to jail to serve their full term if they breach the terms of their licence.

The changes were recommended in an independent review by David Gauke, a former Tory justice secretary, and will be part of a sentencing bill to be published within weeks in order for ministers to be able to get it through Parliament by the New Year.

An MoJ spokesman said: “This Government inherited a prison system days away from collapse. That is why we are building 14,000 more prison places, with 2500 already delivered, but we know we can’t build our way out of this crisis.

“Without further action, we will run out of prison places in months, courts would halt trials and the police cancel arrests.

“That is why, as part of our plan for change, we are overhauling sentencing to make sure we always have the prison places needed to keep the country safe.”

It comes after Mahmood announced judges are to get new powers to ban offenders from football matches, concerts, pubs, driving and foreign travel.

She wants to ensure that community punishments are not seen as a “soft” alternative to jail but ensure that offenders’ “freedom is restricted” in a similar way to jail, with electronic tagging and curfews creating a form of “house arrest” outside prison.

At present, judges can only place restrictions on attendance at football matches if the offence is linked to violence at games and on driving if the crime involves a vehicle.

The powers will also be extended so that the restrictions can be placed on criminals released from jail as part of their licence conditions policed by the probation service.

Any breach of either the court-imposed curbs or licence conditions would see the criminals brought back before judges to face sanctions, including jail sentences or return to prison.

Robert Jenrick, the shadow justice secretary, said: “By scrapping short prison sentences, [Prime Minister Keir] Starmer is set to unleash a crime wave on Britain. This is a gift to criminals who will soon be free to offend with total impunity.

“There are now record numbers of individuals in our prisons awaiting trial and record numbers of foreign criminals clogging up our jails. Those numbers have risen under Labour’s watch.

“If Starmer brought forward emergency measures to deport foreign criminals and get courts sitting longer, we would support him, but instead he’s determined to see fewer criminals go to jail and risk the safety of the public.”

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