Justice secretary says early prisoner release was ‘difficult decision, but the right one’published at 09:50 BST<\/p>\n
09:50 BST<\/p>\n
Media caption, <\/p>\n
Justice secretary vows courts backlog will reduce<\/p>\n
Next up to face questions from Kuenssberg is Justice Secretary Alex Norris.<\/p>\n
Following the early release of some prisoners this week, Norris is asked if the country is as safe now as it was seven days ago.<\/p>\n
He replies that it was a “difficult decision, but the right one” and that if the 700 individuals were not released the government would have run out of prison spaces, which would have been a larger risk to the public’s safety.<\/p>\n
Pressed on how many of the prisoners were tagged upon release, Norris says that the presumption is that all early released prisoners would get a tag, but he hasn’t yet got the figures from Thursday.<\/p>\n
He says a wide set of tools is in place to support probation staff’s ability to monitor former convicts, and \u00a3700m was being invested in the system.<\/p>\n
Moving on to the scrapping of plans to scale back jury trials in an effort to combat a record backlogs of trials, Norris says reform is still needed, and a “significant programme of reform” will be brought to parliament.<\/p>\n
He says that by removing the judge-only trials element, the other package of changes can be moved forward more quickly and the backlog is expected to fall over the next 10 years.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Justice secretary says early prisoner release was ‘difficult decision, but the right one’published at 09:50 BST 09:50 BST…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":620245,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[138,246,111,139,69,244,245],"class_list":["post-620244","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-personal-finance","tag-business","tag-finance","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-personal-finance","tag-personalfinance"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/620244","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=620244"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/620244\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/620245"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=620244"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=620244"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=620244"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}