Both actual public safety and the public’s perception of the state’s competence to protect them from harm are at risk from the government’s plan to overcome prison crowding by simply releasing criminals, an extraordinary group of Britain’s most senior policemen and spies have warned.
The chief of the Metropolitan Police — who is Britain’s most senior police officer — and other security state leaders including the deputy-head of the UK’s domestic intelligence agency MI5 and a top counter-terror officer wrote to the government to warn it risks doing harm to public safety by emptying the prisons, it has been revealed. The extraordinary letter is said to have been sent earlier this month but has now been revealed by a report in The Times as those individuals are stated to say their concerns haven’t been addressed and a new letter has been penned, in public this time, to warn of a funding crisis for policing.
The letter to the Ministry of Justice “warned” the Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer that the plan to relieve severe prison over-crowding by releasing many back into the community early could be harmful. Per the report, the letter from the government’s own security apparatus said: “we are concerned that the proposals could be of net detriment to public safety and certainty to public confidence in policing and the criminal justice system… we have to ensure that out of court does not mean out of justice, and out of prison does not mean out of control”.
The letter said that even during a time of focus on short prison sentences and using prison to reform offenders to reduce recidivism, prison still “provides the community with a sense of justice and temporary respite, stopping their offending during their prison term” in the case of serial repeat-offenders.
Were the plan of releasing prisoners early — many have already been released — to continue, the government was warned the police and security services would need considerable additional money to keep the peace, with so many extra criminals at large.
Among the signatories said to have been behind the letter were the head of London’s Metropolitan Police and the UK’s top cop Sir Mark Rowley, an unnamed deputy director-general of the Security Service MI5, the director-general of the National Crime Agency, and several other senior policer officers including the national lead on counter-terror policing.
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