Two New Ideas to Relieve Prisons

The recent drama surrounding an early release day highlighted something that many in the legal world have known for a long time: namely that prisons (and the criminal justice system in general) have reached breaking point.

In this newsletter, I have argued that the best long-term solution to this problem is to build more prisons and adapt the Sentencing Code to place more reliance on rehabilitation and community sentences, instead of just locking people up behind bars.

That is all well and good, but those proposals will take many years to bear fruit. In the shorter term, the government will be forced to get creative in order to alleviate pressures across the criminal justice system. This is especially true given the state of government finances following the failures of the previous, Conservative administration.

In this vein, two proposals have been put forward recently that offer food for thought.