The 100-Year Life Health Education and Government
Shabana Mahmood, the UK’s justice secretary, told MPs yesterday that after the August bank holiday there were less than a hundred spaces available in men’s prisons across England and Wales. The prison system, she said, was “just one bad day from disaster”. The government’s short-term solution has been a series of early releases, with 1,100 more prisoners released yesterday. But that has done little to address the systemic problems which put the prison estate in such a precarious position in the first place. Labour’s proposed solution is a sentencing review headed by David Gauke, the former Conservative justice minister. Both Gauke and Mahmood have argued that reforming and modernising sentencing is the only way forward, rather than the government building its way out of the crisis.
