The justice secretary, Michael Gove, is considering the extension of a scheme to send home more foreign prisoners before their full sentences have been served.
The move is one of a wide range of options being looked at to reduce the number of prisoners being held in increasingly violent jails, which currently stands at 85,000 in England and Wales.
Last year nearly 1,800 foreign nationals were sent home up to nine months before their prison release dates under the early removal scheme. But the decision to look at extending the scheme to apply earlier than nine months reflects the failure of a series of much-trumpeted prisoner transfer agreements with countries including Jamaica, Ghana and Nigeria that ministers hoped would significantly reduce the 10,000-plus population of foreign nationals in jails in England and Wales.
Official figures show that only 34 foreign nationals were repatriated under the agreements in 2014. Whitehall sources confirm that Gove is now looking to extend the scheme as part of a range of options, though the move is unlikely to cut the daily prison population by more than a few hundred.
The disclosure of the figures comes as the head of the prison service told the Guardian that one of the biggest challenges facing jails in England and Wales was dealing with new types of drugs that have become available.
The nine-month early removal scheme applies to prisoners serving sentences of three years or more who are first considered for release at the halfway point of 18 months or more. Any move to reduce further the amount of time they spend in an English or Welsh jail before being sent home is likely to provoke a sharp reaction from rightwing Conservative MPs.
A Ministry of Justice spokesperson, responding to a Times report that the move was under consideration, said: “We want foreign criminals deported as quickly as possible. We also want to ensure the sentences handed down to British criminals keep all our citizens safe. Protecting the public is our first responsibility and we won’t compromise on that for any reason.”
A second option being looked at is to let out more prisoners on early and day release schemes monitored by satellite tracking.
Gove told MPs on Tuesday: “I would like to see an expansion of release on temporary licence across the prison estate … We must ensure an appropriate assessment of the risk posed by releasing offenders in such a way, but we must also reinforce the initiative of prison governors who want people out there working and accustoming themselves to life on the outside.”
Hopes of a big expansion in early release, underwritten by the use of satellite tracking tags to reassure the public, are on hold because of lengthy delays in developing the technology. Justice ministers announced in July that the introduction of a £265m programme of next-generation GPS tags had been delayed for at least another 12 months.
Despite facing deep cuts in his justice ministry budget, Gove won protection for the operational budget for prisons in the chancellor’s spending review, reducing some of the pressure to find immediate ways of reducing the prison population.
The chief executive of the national offender management service, Michael Spurr, told the Guardian’s Erwin James that one of the biggest challenges he faced was the impact of legal highs, or new psychoactive substances (NPS).
“The dynamic in prisons has definitely changed over recent years. And it’s not just an excuse to say NPS have made a difference – they have made a real difference,” he said.
“New types of drugs have just flooded into prisons, which we’ve taken some time to get on top of – the whole difficulty of testing and detecting them, and the fact that lots of people initially were saying they’re legal. You could buy them in shops on the street.
“Ordinary families were bringing them in. And then you had an issue around organised crime syndicates looking to supply. So you’ve got the drugs coming in, the new regimes, the higher population in some parts of the country that led to issues around staffing as well, and that’s put a lot of pressure on the service. So, is it where I want it to be? No.”
The shadow justice secretary, Lord Falconer, said warnings by Lord Woolf, the chief inspector of prisons, and prison governors that the prison system was at breaking point were damning.
“Ministers have repeatedly ignored warnings and failed to act, leaving themselves with no choice but to look at early release regardless of public safety and victims’ wishes,” he said. “Instead of panic measures forced upon them that risk undermining the public’s confidence in our justice system, the government needs to accept there is a problem and urgently address the systemic issues in our jails.”
