In February, Britain’s justice secretary, Shabana Mahmood, traveled to Texas. As a lawmaker from the center-left Labour Party, her trip to the Republican state was somewhat off-brand, but she was on a serious mission: to try to find solutions to Britain’s chronic prison overcrowding crisis.
During a visit to Estelle Supermax Penitentiary in Huntsville, Ms. Mahmood spoke to inmates and officers about their experiences. She was accompanied by David Gauke, a former Conservative Party politician, who had been asked by the government to draw up a plan for tackling Britain’s shortage of prison cells.
On Thursday, Mr. Gauke published his review. It recommended the government adopt a policy being used in Texas, and indeed more widely across the United States, allowing inmates to earn early release through good behavior.
The government said it would accept the recommendation as part of a broader overhaul of sentencing policies aimed at cutting the number of inmates before cells run out.
More than 16,000 prisoners were released early in Britain last year under an emergency move by the government to relieve overcrowding, and Mr. Gauke’s review said that plans to build more jails “still fall short” of what is needed.
Mr. Gauke, who served as Britain’s justice secretary between 2018 and 2019, said the crisis had been driven by a “political narrative” in which the Conservatives and other previous governments claimed to be “tough on crime.” They introduced policies that increased the length of sentences and the proportion of terms spent behind bars.
That approach was “unsustainable,” the report concluded, because prison capacity did not keep pace with rising demand for cells, while the number of inmates sent back to prison for breaking their conditions or reoffending also soared.
The government said Thursday it would carry out most of Mr. Gauke’s recommendations and pursue a separate policy to expand the chemical castration of sex offenders, which it said would reduce sex crimes.
Addressing Parliament on Thursday, Ms. Mahmood said she wanted Britain to echo Texas’s “good conduct time” model, saying that it had “cut crime and brought their prison population under control.”
The program, operated by the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, allows inmates to shorten the time served before being eligible for parole by behaving well and taking part in rehabilitative activities.
In the United States, at least 42 of the 50 states reward prisoners by making them eligible for early release, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Some states give credit simply for compliance with prison rules, while others give credit for participation in programs like work force training and education.
Mr. Gauke’s review said there would be an “expectation” that a vast majority of prisoners “would be released at the one-third point” of their sentences and supervised afterward under Britain’s version of the program, which will be called the “earned progression model.”
The Ministry of Justice expects the prison system will need to accommodate more than 100,000 prisoners in England and Wales by March 2029. The current operational capacity is below 85,000.
Mr. Gauke wrote that there was an “urgent need for change,” with demand for prison cells already coming “dangerously close to exceeding supply” and forcing emergency short-term measures.
Ms. Mahmood rejected calls to extend the “earned progression model” to the most dangerous criminals, including violent and sexual offenders given extended sentences.
Mr. Gauke’s review also proposed expanding the alternatives to prison time, including more use of electronic monitoring for lower-level offenses.
Groups representing prison officers, administrators and probation officers raised doubts about the feasibility of the plans, warning of shortages of the probation officers needed to monitor released prisoners and a lack of training and educational opportunities inside jails for the good conduct program.
In a statement, Mr. Gauke said the “scale of the crisis” meant fundamental change was necessary.
“Overcrowded prisons are leading to dangerous conditions for staff and contributing to high levels of reoffending,” he wrote. “We cannot build our way out of it. To stabilize the prison system and end the dangerous cycle of emergency releases, the government must take decisive action.”
Mr. Gauke said his proposals would reduce the prison population of England and Wales by 9,800 people — exceeding the target of 9,500 that the Ministry of Justice has said is necessary.
The review drew a backlash from the Conservatives and the right-wing populist Reform U.K. party. Robert Jenrick, the Conservatives’ justice spokesman, said instituting the recommendations would be a “gift to criminals who will be free to offend with impunity.”
Separately, the government announced plans to extend a chemical castration program for sex offenders — a process that involves using drugs to reduce testosterone production and suppress sexual desire.
A pilot program in southwest England will expand to two regions to include 20 prisons, Ms. Mahmood said.
The plans go further than recommendations in Mr. Gauke’s report, which called only for the government to expand the “use of chemical suppression for sex offenders.”
The review found that while chemical castration was used in several European countries and U.S. states, evidence on its effectiveness was limited
The post Short of Prison Space, U.K. Will Adopt U.S. Model of Time Off for Good Conduct appeared first on New York Times.
