The early release row consuming Andy Burnham's government is not, at its core, about whether the killers of PC Andrew Harper walk free early. It is about a three-decade confidence trick in which successive governments legislated longer sentences to win headlines, then used administrative release schemes to manage the capacity consequences — until a letter lands on a victim's doormat and the whole arrangement is exposed. The numbers tell the structural story. England and Wales now hold 86,536 people in prison custody, nearly double the 44,000 of 1993. Average sentences for indictable offences rose from 16 months to 22.2 months over the same period — driven by what former Conservative justice secretary David Gauke called a "bidding war" between parties over who could appear toughest on crime. Meanwhile, the remand population has ballooned to over 15,000 (18% of the total) thanks to pandemic-era court backlogs that still haven't cleared. The revolving door is accelerating. Licence recalls hit 51,419 in the year ending March 2026, up from 40,259 the previous year — a 28% spike. Many experts attribute this directly to previous early release schemes: without adequate support on the outside, released prisoners breach conditions and return within days. Criminal justice consultant Gethin Jones describes working with a young man recalled after just six days following a drug relapse. "There's still not the support in place. It will be an absolute miracle if he doesn't get recalled again." Burnham's proposed fixes — faster deportation of foreign offenders, resolving the IPP sentence injustice, repurposing women's prisons — are tactical patches on a strategic failure. The government is simultaneously pressing ahead with plans to build 14,000 new prison places by 2031, mainly secure Category B and C facilities. Former Belmarsh governor John Podmore argues this misreads the population entirely: a good proportion of prisoners are within 12 months of release and don't need that level of security. "We should be locking up people we're afraid of, not people who we're mad at." By his estimate, fewer than 30,000 of the current population genuinely threaten the public. The operational chaos compounds daily. Prison Service leaders are described as "terrified of another exemption" to early release, navigating a haphazard system of sentence discounts and added days to determine eligibility. Previous schemes released some prisoners in error. Probation officers have now voted decisively for strike action over workloads they expect to worsen when the autumn release begins. The justice secretary, Alex Norris, has been tasked with fast-tracking measures to free up space and will report to parliament next month. The institutional instability is its own indictment: 10 justice secretaries and 13 prison ministers in the past decade. No other area of government policy has experienced this level of leadership churn while managing a population that doubled. The public, per YouGov polling, already believes prisons are failing both to punish and to rehabilitate. They are correct on both counts. The deeper extraction here is from the public itself. Politicians captured the political benefit of appearing tough through longer sentences, then shifted the cost of impossibility onto victims (who discover early release via doormat letter), onto probation officers (whose caseloads distend overnight), onto prisoners warehoused without rehabilitation, and onto communities that receive them back more damaged than they entered. Richard Garside of the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies frames it precisely: parliament promises punishment that cannot be delivered, and the gap is closed administratively, out of sight.
