Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in. Perhaps a Godfather quotation is not entirely appropriate for the subject matter but, more than five years after leaving the Ministry of Justice I am back – rather to my surprise – chairing an independent review of sentencing policy.
It is a privilege to serve, not least because such a review is timely and necessary. It is timely because we face an immediate crisis in prison capacity. The current government inherited a situation in which we were very close to running out of places and had no choice but to take emergency measures and release prisoners early. Anyone in office over the summer would have done the same. But these emergency measures, including further releases today, only provided a brief respite. Demand for prison places is currently growing at 4,500 a year, much faster than the supply of places. This means that unless strategic measures are taken, we will repeatedly risk running out of places.
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