Prisoners may have to earn their freedom through “good behaviour credits” rather than be automatically released after a set period as part of an overhaul being considered by the government.
The justice secretary, Shabana Mahmood, who travelled to Texas where a similar scheme was introduced more than a decade ago, said she wanted a “carrot-and-stick” approach throughout the prison system in England and Wales.
In Texas, there is no automatic early release scheme. Instead, prisoners can reduce the length of time they serve by earning “good behaviour and good time” credits, which means they can serve as little as 25% of their sentence behind bars if they maintain good behaviour and work productively.
Automatic early release was introduced in England and Wales in 1991 for prisoners sentenced to less than four years, but expanded to more serious criminals in 2003. Now up to 70% of prisoners will be released automatically. If rolled out, prisoners could earn credits via work, training or taking part in any education scheme.
Mahmood told the Daily Telegraph: “We’ve got to be open to all potential future constructions of sentences. If you’re going to think about incentivised behaviour, obviously it’s a carrot and a stick, isn’t it? So you can’t then leave unchanged the rest of your current sentencing framework on automatic releases.
“If you’re going to go down the road of incentivisation, actually that might mean some things no longer become automatic. But we would have to consider carefully how you would take the best learning from the law and read across to our system because our arrangements are different. Although that’s the benefit of having a review, which means we can.”
David Gauke, the former Conservative justice secretary under Theresa May’s premiership, accompanied Mahmood on the Texas trip, during which they assessed how well good behaviour and intensive rehabilitation schemes had helped to reduce prison overcrowding.
Such changes in the US state have reduced the number of offenders recalled to jail to 16.6%, as national levels hover about 68%.
Gauke said incentivising people over time allowed a “more considered approach to assessing their behaviour”.
A large proportion of prisoners in England and Wales are released on licence after serving 40-60% of fixed-term sentences.
Last week, the Prison Reform Trust urged the government to consider abolishing the use of short, fixed-term recalls of 28 days or fewer, amid concerns that the rising numbers of people being recalled to prison was “trapping” them in the criminal justice system.
An independent sentencing review said longer jail terms had been a “kneejerk” policy response to show action by successive governments.
According to the latest data from the Ministry of Justice, the number of prisoners in England and Wales reached 86,941, the highest since 21 October last year, which was the day before the government released more than 1,000 prisoners as part of its urgent measures to ease the overcrowding crisis.
