On 23 May, the Government will extend their prisons’ early release scheme to allow people to leave prison up to 70 days before the end of their sentence. This is in an effort to ease overcrowding and free up prison spaces in a system currently running at 110% of capacity.
The scheme, officially called ‘The End of Custody Supervised License (ECSL)’ came into force in October to ease overcrowding in jails across England and Wales. The length of time people are being release early has increased in stages since then. Sex offenders, terrorists, serious violent offenders, and those serving sentences of more than four years are not eligible for release.
Campbell Robb, Chief Executive, Nacro, comments: “The prisons’ crisis is a failure decades in the making, that’s growing on a daily basis. Whilst it is vital something is done to ease pressure on the overflowing prisons system. It must be well managed, risk assessed and properly resourced.
“We’ve heard from our services that in the early days of the scheme, people were being told that morning they were getting out of prison. Even now the organisations supporting people on release are only hearing a few days in advance of someone coming out. This makes it extremely difficult to arrange housing, benefits, and medication on release. Because people don’t have these basics in place, we are setting people up to fail and as a result some are being recalled back to prison before their original release date. This is not good for anyone – victims, the public or people leaving prison.”
