SerpApi.Org
Sarah Wilson was just 11 when groups of men in Rotherham started grooming and abusing her in 2003. She was targeted while in her school playground, abused until she was 16 and trafficked around the country. For more than a decade, Wilson, now 34, has been fighting for justice against the men who abused her. Seven have been convicted of offences against her, and she has sat through three different trials. One ended just a few months ago.
Then she received word that two of her abusers, Obaidullah Omari and Riyasth Hussain, could be let out early under Labour’s prisoner release scheme. “The world stopped,” says Wilson, who has waived her anonymity. “I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t sleep. I didn’t know what to do.”
She is one of almost 9,000 survivors of serious sexual or violent crimes who have been warned their attackers are set to be freed early from jail from September, when the Government’s new Sentencing Act comes into force.
The 8,711 victims were informed in letters from the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) that under new laws, criminals convicted of serious offences will be released months or even years earlier to ease prison overcrowding. These offences include rape, manslaughter and grievous bodily harm.
Among those who might be freed early are two of the three offenders convicted of manslaughter in the case of Pc Andrew Harper, who was killed in the line of duty in 2019. Such was the outcry when The Telegraph reported their potential release on Tuesday night, that on Wednesday morning Andy Burnham said he will review the decision – and opened the door to a wider examination of the policy to free criminals early.
Other candidates for early release include Carl Tomlinson and Callum Ayre, two passengers in the car that struck and killed Andrew Flamson, 40, in 2022 in Coventry. “I’m sick to my stomach,” says Flamson’s mother, Janice Lees. “They will be rejoicing in prison.”
The letter received by Lees, Harper’s mother Debbie Adlam, and so many others acknowledged that the “information may be difficult” and recognised “the lasting impact the offence may have had” on the recipient.
But what lesson, wonders Wilson, is our Government teaching dangerous offenders? “To me, [their sentences were] justice and now it feels like part of that justice is getting snatched away,” she says.
Survivors don’t yet know for certain whether their attacker will be among those freed early from this autumn, but the scheme will make serious criminals eligible for release halfway through their sentences, rather than two thirds of the way through, provided they have not committed any serious breaches of the rules while behind bars. The uncertainty surrounding who will be let out early is punishing in itself, say critics of the measures.
“It’s appalling,” says Dr Kieran Mullan, Conservative shadow justice minister. “I’ve met many of the people affected and they’re devastated by it. People can’t sleep, it’s caused them to have a relapse of mental health issues and the trauma they experienced. Many have said it’s made them feel disempowered, not in control, back to the way they felt when they were victims.”
Receiving the letter in itself is “highly distressing” for them, he says – and in the event that their perpetrator doesn’t end up getting out early after all, “how pointlessly traumatising is that?”
So how did we reach this point and what alternative solutions are there? Our prisons have been overcrowded for decades, despite the billions of pounds thrown at the problem by successive governments. While capacity has been increased, it has not matched demand. Plans to deliver 20,000 more prison places in England and Wales by the mid-2020s have been delayed until 2031 and are expected to cost at least £4.2bn more than planned.
Owing to what the parliamentary public accounts committee last year branded “poor planning and delays”, the adult male prison estate was operating at 98 per cent to 99.7 per cent occupancy between October 2022 and August 2024. “Overcrowding is endemic, staff are overburdened, and access to services and purposeful activity is poor,” said a report by the committee published in March last year.
Resorting to early release as a relief valve is not a new response. In 2007, the then Labour government allowed prison governors to release offenders on licence up to 18 days before the end of their sentence, if they’d been given a determinate prison sentence of between four weeks and four years. Over the following three years, more than 80,000 prisoners walked free from jail early under the scheme, but those who had committed violent or sexual offences were not eligible.
The Conservatives attacked the scheme at the time, but with the prison population continuing to climb – and prisons still struggling to absorb it – Rishi Sunak’s Conservative government would, just over a decade later, go on to release more than 10,000 inmates up to 70 days early in just eight months to June 2024.
Then, when Sir Keir Starmer became prime minister the following month, his government allowed for some inmates to be released after serving just 40 per cent of their fixed-term sentence, rather than the usual 50 per cent. Since September 2024, more than 56,000 prisoners have been released early – an average of 3,754 a month.
Aside from the public concerns, it’s proven embarrassing for ministers, with the unsubtle celebrations of some released offenders not helping matters. “Big up, Keir Starmer,” shouted the convicted armed kidnapper Daniel Dowling-Brooks, 29, as he posed against a new Bentley after his early release in October 2024.
The prison overcrowding that led to such scenes is in turn the product of decades of sentencing inflation, some campaigners argue – often the result of politicians promising tougher sentences for particular crimes in response to a particularly shocking case or public anger over certain crimes. In 2025, almost half of determinate prison sentences were over four years, compared with 36 per cent in June 2010, government figures show.
Compared to other Western European countries, we also lock up a particularly high proportion of our population. Between 1900 and 2024, the adult population more than doubled – but our prison population quadrupled, to 87,300.
“The maximum sentence people can get for a whole range of crimes has gone up and up, and without addressing that, the government doesn’t have enough resources to build prisons quickly enough to meet the demand they’re putting on the system,” says Andrew Neilson, director of campaigns at the Howard League for Penal Reform. “Rather than rewriting the laws around how long you go to prison for these crimes, they’re looking at how long do you spend in prison and how much [of the sentence is spent] in the community.”
Labour has accused the Conservatives of failing to build enough prison places in its 14 years in power, when the party added a net total of only 500 to capacity. (Although the Tories actually built more than 13,000 new places in this time, around 12,500 others were closed.)
Labour is in the process of driving through its own prison-building programme and is also reforming sentencing. For jail terms of under 12 months, there is now a presumption in favour of suspended sentences, under which the offender serves no time in prison unless they commit further crimes during that time.
But building more prisons is not a quick or easy fix, and few voters want to live near a new one even if they (or at least their MPs) are keen on more, and longer, custodial sentences. Early release is the controversial stopgap solution we have ended up with.
Archie York was just seven when he was killed by an illegal cannabis factory exploding in the block of flats where he lived in Newcastle. Reece Galbraith, who helped run the drugs lab, was jailed for 14 years for manslaughter but is now among those who could be released early.
“It’s a slap in the face,” Archie’s father, Robbie York, tells The Telegraph. “He shouldn’t get out for what he’s done. The justice system is a joke.”
Remembering the night of the explosion, Archie’s mother, Katherine Errington, explains how she and her seven-week-old baby Finley, Archie’s little brother, were pulled from their ruined home. But Archie didn’t survive.
“Life had only just started for him,” she says. “He loved his little brother for the short weeks he was a big brother. He will never get the chance to have his own life. It’s disgusting.”
Now, Errington is focusing on stopping Labour’s “sickening” early release scheme. “I don’t want families to go through what we have,” she says. “I’m still mothering for Archie, in a way I never thought I would be. By fighting for what’s right, I know I will be making our boy proud.”
Survivors of sex crimes, meanwhile, risk being re-traumatised by the early release – potential or actual – of their assailant. Earlier this month, Jade Belgrove, 30, who was groomed and raped as a child by Simon Tyler, a friend of her family, appealed to Labour to abandon its plans to free him nearly two years early. She waived her anonymity to describe the Government’s early release scheme as an “absolute disgrace” that will put women and children at risk from scores of rapists and sex offenders freed prematurely.
Survivors of sex crimes, meanwhile, risk being re-traumatised by the early release – potential or actual – of their assailant, warn victims’ groups. “We’re very concerned about the impact of early release on survivors,” says Paul Dillane, chief executive of Survivors UK, which works with men and boys. “Recovery isn’t linear and events like release [of a perpetrator] can have a profound psychological impact years after the abuse… This news will be destabilising and of concern to survivors, some of whom are currently in the justice system going through the process, some of whom have been through that process and are now trying to rebuild their life.”
The uncertainty around early release could even deter some survivors from continuing to engage with the justice process, he warns. This could mean some deciding not to give evidence in court. It could mean justice not being served.
Backbenchers including Jess Phillips, Labour’s former Home Office minister, have also expressed concerns over the new measures. Phillips urged the Government to prevent child rapists and grooming gang members from being eligible for the scheme.
Mullan warns not only of the effects on survivors, but of the risk these offenders could pose to the public if they get out early. “These people all have a reoffending risk, and the longer you’re in prison, the less time you have available to reoffend,” he says. “So there’s no way it won’t create a risk.”
What should be done instead to ease overcrowding in our jails then? Mullan points to the more than 10,000 foreign nationals serving time here, and suggests the Government could go “further and faster” in deporting them. “You can rent prison space in other country’s prisons [too],” he adds. “And you can continue making use of the existing early release schemes that exclude all these [serious offenders].”
The Government says it is fixing the prison crisis it inherited, to protect the public, by building 14,000 more places and reforming sentencing. “Without this decisive action, prisons will run out of space entirely as early as November and we will be unable to lock up serious offenders at all,” says an MoJ spokesman.
“Offenders deemed the most dangerous are automatically blocked from early release, and those released face tough restrictions on their movements and tagging – backed by our record £700m investment into probation and community services.”
But even if the new scheme does what it is intended to and creates more slack in the system, it doesn’t solve the problem for good. We are still facing a capacity crisis a few years down the line, projections suggest.
The Government’s response “buys them time”, says Neilson. But, as Burnham appears to realise, given the outrage and fear proliferating in response to this approach, it’s unlikely to buy them friends.
Additional reporting by Meike Eijsberg
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Almost 9,000 victims warned attackers will be freed early
