A man released from prison under the Government’s early release scheme has been charged with murder, it has been reported.
The man, who cannot be named for legal reasons, was charged over the offence in London.
He had previously been imprisoned for knife offences and was released due to prison overcrowding.
It is reportedly the most serious offence committed by a prisoner freed under the scheme, which was introduced by the Labour Government last year as an emergency measure after prisons approached full capacity. At one point, there were around 100 places remaining across the male estate.
The then-Justice Secretary, Shabana Mahmood, said at the time: “In short if we fail to act now, we face the collapse of the criminal justice system. And a total breakdown of law and order.”
The emergency programme allows certain inmates to be released after serving 40% of their fixed-term sentence, rather than the usual 50%. It replaced an earlier scheme introduced by the previous Conservative Government.
Prisoners serving sentences for sexual or domestic abuse, national security offences, or violent crimes with terms longer than four years were excluded from the scheme.
Government figures show that more than 38,000 offenders were freed under the programme between September last year and June, an average of 129 per day.
The charging of the man is expected to prompt a serious further offence review, to determine what might have been done differently before his release, The Times reported.
Between January and June this year, over 21,000 people were recalled to prison, with 11,041 recalls in the April-June period alone.
This represents a significant increase on previous years, with a 36% rise in recalls between April and June compared to 2024 and nearly double the number of recalls in the same period of 2023.
A report by the Institute for Government last week warned that further early release measures for prisoners may be necessary to prevent prisons from running out of space again. It described the criminal justice system as being in a “slow-motion collapse,” with issues particularly severe within the prison system.
The total prison population of England and Wales stood at 87,465 on September 30, up 1% year on year from 86,966 but below the monthly peak of 88,439 at the end of February 2024.
HMP Humber in Brough, near Hull, has released the highest number of inmates so far under the early release scheme (1,126), followed by Berwyn in Wrexham (1,064); Fosse Way in Leicester (1,037); and Parc B in Bridgend (830).
Some 10,879 of the 38,042 early releases (28.6%) were serving sentences of six months or less, with a further 5,241 (13.8%) serving sentences of between six and 12 months.
