About 650 more offenders will leave jails in England and Wales early on Tuesday in the second phase of the government’s plan to tackle the prison population crisis.<\/p>\n
The group will include offenders serving up to two and a half years for crimes.<\/p>\n
Under the new rules, they are leaving jail after serving a third of their sentence behind bars, rather than half.<\/p>\n
The second wave of releases comes as the government takes its plan to radically overhaul criminal courts back to Parliament – but also as probation officers prepare to vote in a ballot that could lead to a strike over pay and workload.<\/p>\n
Some 700 offenders left jail early on 1 October – all of whom were serving terms of less than 19 months.<\/p>\n
Monday’s second stage begins the process of releasing batches of offenders serving increasingly long sentences – culminating next June with those serving more than 12 years.<\/p>\n
Napo, the probation service union, said the releases have put enormous strain on its members, who are charged with monitoring the offenders in the community.<\/p>\n
Typically, those being released should expect to be electronically tagged and subject to other monitoring conditions for the second third of their sentence.<\/p>\n
On Tuesday, the union’s members will meet to discuss next week’s vote, which could lead to strike action. Probation officers have been offered a 5% pay rise by the Ministry of Justice (MoJ), while it had demanded 12% as part of a plan to make up for loss of earnings caused by cuts from 2010.<\/p>\n
The MoJ says the offer is fair and has been accepted by two other unions and is twinned with a \u00a3700m investment in probation to recruit 1,300 extra officers and the roll-out of AI tools to cut the workload of monitoring offenders.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"About 650 more offenders will leave jails in England and Wales early on Tuesday in the second phase…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":800848,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[59,57,58,50,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-800847","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-kingdom","tag-gb","tag-great-britain","tag-greatbritain","tag-news","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/800847","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=800847"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/800847\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/800848"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=800847"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=800847"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=800847"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}