Riots force emergency action to stop prison overcrowding

Emergency plans to prevent prison overcrowding have been activated as the arrests of rioters place further pressure on Britain’s struggling jails.
Operation Early Dawn, a contingency plan that was previously triggered for a week in March, forces the police to release suspects on bail rather than take them to a court hearing if there is no prison space available. Ministers insist no one who poses a danger to the public will be released.
The measure will be put in place in the North East and Yorkshire, Cumbria and Lancashire, and Manchester, Merseyside and Cheshire regions.
Lord Timpson, the prisons and probation minister, said: “We inherited a justice system in crisis and exposed to shocks. As a result, we have been forced into making difficult but necessary decisions to keep it operating.”
Mark Fairhurst, chairman of the Prison Officers’ Association, warned that the measure risks “clogging up police cells”. He told BBC Radio 4’s Broadcasting House on Sunday: “This is all a result of the rioters. Last week we had the biggest influx of new receptions I’ve seen for quite some time. We had 397 new receptions. As of Friday we only had 340 spaces left in the adult closed male estate, which is feeling the most pressure.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if at some point [on Monday morning] the Ministry of Justice would announce that Operation Early Dawn kicks into play at some point next week, probably Tuesday onwards.”
Fairhurst said the move would put pressure on police forces. “You’re now clogging up police cells, so they haven’t got the power to arrest people and put them away in a police cell,” he said. “It has a massive knock-on effect on the entire criminal justice system.”
Those locked up for rioting will also place an “extra level of complexity” on the overstretched probation service, the chief inspector of probation has warned.
A senior government source also said that the large numbers of people imprisoned for their role in the riots will probably lead to emergency early release measures staying in place for longer than expected.
The Ministry of Justice has had to bring forward the use of 567 new prison cells that were earmarked to open at the end of this month to cope with the extra demand.
As of Friday, more than 300 people have been remanded into custody for their role in the violent disorder that erupted after the Southport stabbings on July 29, with 460 arrests. Many more are expected to be arrested and charged as police leaders have vowed to track down offenders for “as long as it takes”.
From September 10, thousands of prisoners will start being released 40 per cent of the way through their sentence as part of the emergency measures announced last month.
The measures are due to come to an end in 18 months’ time but a senior government source said: “Our modelling was based on the fact that you don’t usually lock up that many people in August but we’ve ended up locking lots of people up in August.
“That means they’re eating into the amount of time we bought ourselves. It’s currently 18 months but we could lose a month, two months. It makes it tighter at the back end of the 18-month period.”
There is particular pressure on prisons in regions that experienced the most rioting, such as the northwest and northeast of England. The new cell blocks that have been opened were not in those two regions. Instead, they are at Stocken Prison in Rutland and Cookham Wood, a former young offender institution in Kent that has been repurposed for adults.
Martin Jones, chief inspector of probation, warned that the nature of the offenders convicted for their role in the riots would place a unique challenge on the probation service because most of them are new offenders, making it difficult to predict their potential risk of offending and for officers to manage them.
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He told The Times: “It’s an additional layer of challenge. The other thing that’s quite interesting … is it’s mostly people with no previous convictions. Quite often, the people that you see entering the system are people that have got long track records of offending, so you’re getting people that are perhaps slightly different to what you’ve seen before.
“Inevitably, those people are going to be released in due course, depending on the length of their sentence, [and] there’s an additional level of complexity in relation to their supervision. It increases the overall sort of caseload as part of it. My view is the probation service will need to find a way of coping with that.”
A MoJ spokesman said: “The first job of this government is to keep people safe and the new lord chancellor [Shabana Mahmood] has taken action to make sure the justice system is always able to lock up dangerous offenders, protect the public and reduce reoffending.
“This government will always make sure we have the prison places we need, and we have taken decisive action to see criminals who break the law swiftly brought to justice.
“We will update on operational decisions in the normal way.”