The injustice of early releases

Carol Higgins’ face is a mask of terror as she contemplates the prospect of her father being released from prison.

“I haven’t even got to a point where I can speak about it without it affecting me,” she told Channel 4 News. “So there’s no way he should be coming out of prison now.”

She is one of thousands of victims to have received letters from their local Victim Liaison Unit warning that the men who raped and tortured them could soon be released under the Government’s latest early-release scheme, introduced to relieve chronic prison overcrowding. For survivors, the envelope on the doormat was a brutal reminder that, when prisons run out of space, their sense of safety is expendable.

The Government insists it has little choice. Ministers argue that the prison estate is dangerously close to capacity and that, without earlier release, there will soon be nowhere to house newly convicted offenders. GPS tags, curfews and tougher penalties for breaching licence conditions are intended to reassure an anxious public that offenders will remain under close supervision. For victims struggling to piece together their shattered psyche, those assurances are cold comfort.

Earlier this week, Shabir Ahmed, one of the ringleaders of the Rochdale grooming gang, was released from prison. Now 73, Ahmed was jailed for 22 years in 2012 after being convicted of 30 child rape offences.

One of his victims, Ruby, who became pregnant at 13 as a result of the abuse, says the promised support for survivors has failed to materialise.

“There is no team of people in place,” she told the BBC. “Despite the government saying there would be a dedicated team for victims, that has not been done.”

Today, she fears for her own children. She has already come face to face with another of her abusers in a Rochdale supermarket, unaware that he had already been released from prison.

This is not Britain’s first attempt to ease prison overcrowding. Since the emergency Standard Determinate Sentence 40 (SDS40) scheme was introduced in September 2024, almost 49,000 prisoners have been released after serving 40 rather than 50 per cent of their custodial sentence. 

The latest reforms go much further. From September, around 700 prisoners are expected to be released in the first wave, with thousands more to follow. Many offenders serving standard determinate sentences will become eligible for release after serving one third of their sentence, rather than 40 per cent, while some violent and sexual offenders currently released become eligible at the halfway point rather than two thirds the way through. Some criminal barristers have pointed out that victims will have spent longer pursuing justice through the courts than their attackers ultimately spend behind bars.

The Ministry of Justice has not published an overall figure for those who will benefit, but prisons minister James Timpson has said the reforms are expected to free around 7,500 prison places. 

The release of Ahmed has prompted an unusually robust political response. Prime Minister Keir Starmer has asked the Home Secretary to review his case with a view to deportation. Andy Burnham has likewise pressed for Ahmed’s removal from the country, while former safeguarding minister Jess Phillips has argued that child rapists should be excluded from the early-release scheme altogether.

It took one of Britain’s most notorious grooming gang cases for ministers to rediscover their political instincts, if not their sense of decency. It’s good that they have objected to such a glaring injustice, I suppose, but there is more than a hint of “the objection that proves the rule” to their complaints.

But Carol Higgins is no less traumatised because her abuser never made the national headlines. Nor is the woman raped by an ex-partner, the child abused by her father, or the victim of a serial domestic abuser any less frightened when she learns that the man responsible may soon be back in the community. 

Politics is about priorities. Prison overcrowding is a serious problem, sure, and every government inherits difficult trade-offs. Yet if ministers truly believe early releases are unavoidable, the very least they owe victims is the certainty that violent and sexual offenders will not walk free after serving barely half — or, in some cases, little more than a third — of the sentences imposed by the courts. When the state shortens those sentences for its own convenience, it sends the bleak message that justice, and the peace of mind of victims, are expendable.