More than perhaps any other cabinet minister, Shabana Mahmood inherited an emergency. Prisons had been operating at 99 per cent capacity since the start of 2023 and the system was close to collapse (the Conservatives only added 482 extra places during their time in office).
“Those responsible – Sunak and his gang in No 10 – should go down in history as the guilty men,” Mahmood declared last July, channelling the anti-appeasement polemic, as she was forced to release thousands of inmates early.
But the Justice Secretary’s actions only deferred rather than ended the crisis. Without radical reform, the system would soon be overwhelmed again. “Even when you build new prisons at an unbelievably rapid rate – the largest expansion since the Victorians – you still end up very soon having demand outstrip supply,” a Ministry of Justice (MoJ) official told me (with a projected shortfall of 9,800 places by early 2028). Without change, the police would be left unable to make arrests and courts unable to hold trials.
This looming catastrophe was the inspiration behind the independent sentencing review, chaired by David Gauke, the former justice secretary and New Statesman columnist (who writes exclusively for us today). Gauke was tasked, in the words of one MoJ source, with “making necessity the mother of invention”.
His proposals include ending the use of short sentences of 12 months or less – linked to chronic reoffending rates – in all but “exceptional circumstances” (with a dramatic expansion of community sentences), making suspended sentences available for up to three years rather than two, deporting foreign criminals after they have served only 12 per cent of their overall sentence and exploring greater use of chemical castration for sex offenders (an approach that Mahmood, struck by international evidence on reoffending rates, believes has significant potential).
The centrepiece of Gauke’s 192-page report is a new “earned progression model”, modelled on the successful Texan system, which will allow most prisoners to be released after serving just a third of their sentence, provided they behave well. If they do not, they will be detained until the halfway point. Those who are released will undergo “intensive supervision” until they are two thirds of the way through their sentence (Mahmood has secured £700m from the Treasury to buy almost 30,000 additional electronic tags).
Mahmood will accept almost all of Gauke’s proposals with one notable exception: dangerous offenders will remain ineligible for parole until they have served two thirds of their sentence (rather than potentially being released halfway through by engaging in rehabilitation activities).
Mindful of an inevitable political backlash, Mahmood has been careful to present liberal reforms with a conservative ethos: she chose Gauke, a former Tory cabinet minister, rather than a left-wing darling to lead the review. Penal reformers traditionally lionise the Netherlands and the Nordic countries; Mahmood chose Texas, a Republican state, as her lodestar. And then there is the Justice Secretary herself – a self-described “law-and-order” politician – who owes far more to Blue Labour’s social conservatism than she does to the soft left’s civil libertarianism. Her team emphasises that, even after the system is reformed, there will still be more people in prison than ever before.
In short, think not of John Stuart Mill but of Thomas Hobbes. Rather than liberal idealism, Mahmood’s reforms are driven by the first duty of government – the preservation of order. “The alternative here is unconscionable,” an aide says. “We saw how close we came when we entered office to it all falling apart.”
This piece first appeared in the Morning Call newsletter; receive it every morning by subscribing on Substack here
[See also: Gordon Brown: Child poverty is a scar on our national conscience]
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