The early-release scheme – the first big test of Andy Burnham’s nascent premiership – has sparked outrage. From October, around 5,000 prisoners will be released ahead of schedule to free up space in the nation’s dangerously overcrowded prisons. The standard time served in custody will be reduced from 50 per cent of a sentence to 33 per cent. The scheme has been tweaked to exclude those convicted of rape and serial sexual offences (murderers and terrorists were already exempt), but that still leaves thousands of potentially dangerous individuals out on Britain’s streets earlier than expected.
Many of them will reoffend. And an even sadder fact is that this would have been the case whether they were to be released early or not. The latest Ministry of Justice data shows that adult offenders had a proven reoffending rate of 28.8 per cent in the first quarter of 2024. For those with multiple previous convictions, that number rises to as high as 48.3 per cent.
The row over exactly which offenders may or may not be eligible for early release masks an uncomfortable reality: our criminal justice system fails to keep people out of prison once they have left. Reoffending is a serious challenge, but it’s not the only consideration. Prisoners released on licence partway through their sentences can be recalled to custody for any number of transgressions, such as failure to check in with a probation officer or breaking a curfew. Recalls have been on the rise – in the first three months of 2026, 101 people were recalled to prison for every 100 released.
This is not a new problem. In 2023 I sat down with the Bafta-nominated journalist (and former inmate of HMP Wandsworth) Chris Atkins, who had just written a book on his experience of the prison system. Time After Time details what Atkins described as the “conveyor belt” or “airport luggage carousel” that transports newly released inmates straight back into custody. The reasons won’t surprise you: untreated addictions or mental health issues, family breakdown, insecure housing, lack of education or job opportunities. The explanations as to why someone might end up in prison are, without intervention, exacerbated by their time inside. An ex-offender with no fixed address or with an untreated addiction is likely to break their licence conditions or reoffend, landing them right back where they started.
I’d highly recommend the book, if only for the eye-opening anecdotes (such as one man deliberately breaking his parole because returning to prison was the only way to access his medication for his mental illness – or another who was wrongly released after being mistaken for his non-identical twin brother). But there’s a serious policy lesson here too. “If we solved reoffending, we’d prevent 80 per cent of all crimes,” Atkins writes. When we met, he told me he is often asked why a cash-strapped nation should allocate resources to some of the worst people in society. “And I say you’re not really spending money on them, you’re spending money on the next set of victims that they’re going to create unless we can do something to tackle this.”
The cohort of early releases may be even more likely to be recalled or reconvicted than the general prison population – in the chaos of altering thousands of release dates, resources for housing provision and probation services will be even more stretched. It is inevitable that in a few months’ time we’ll see horror stories about what they got up to on the outside. And that will – rightly – be treated as a scandal.
But the status quo is an even bigger scandal. A crime doesn’t suddenly become less damaging because it was committed by an ex-offender who served the standard 50 per cent of their sentence in prison rather than one who served the revised 33 per cent. In so far as outrage can drive political change, maybe this is our moment to get serious about halting the airport luggage carousel.
[Further reading: Can Andy Burnham move fast enough for voters?]
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This article appears in the 12 Aug 2026 issue of the New Statesman, A Very British Scandal
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