Victims of sexual abuse have said they feel “exhausted” as they are in limbo over whether their abusers will be included in the Government’s early release scheme this autumn.
Prime Minister Andy Burnham said he has paused the entire programme to reconsider whether those who are in jail for serious sexual crimes – including paedophiles and rapists – will have their custodial sentences cut short amid a crisis in prison capacity.
Under current plans they were among the 6,000 due to be released from September.
The victims waived their right to anonymity at a press conference alongside Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch and shadow justice minister Kieran Mullan, where they expressed anger and fatigue over whether their abusers would be back on the streets within weeks.
The Conservatives have called for emergency legislation to formally halt any early releases from taking place.
However the Ministry of Justice has disputed whether new laws are necessary as Justice Secretary Alex Norris already has power to change the release date or stop it altogether.
Survivors were due to hand a petition signed by more than 100,000 in to Downing Street at lunchtime on Tuesday calling for Mr Burnham to “urgently rethink” the plans.
Jade Belgrove, who is a child rape survivor, said: “We can’t carry on like this. We can’t face this trauma day-in, day-out, it’s so tiring and we’re tired of fighting. We need this resolved, and we need it sorted now.”
Marie Stone, who was sexually assaulted as a child by Harry Miah who is due to be released if his 18-year term is cut to six years, said: “We are exhausted. Absolutely exhausted, to our stomachs. I just feel that something needs to be done.”
Ms Stone added: “We have this for our lives, PTSD for life, if anybody knows what that actually means, it’s destroying us.”
Vicki Crawford, whose attacker was jailed for abusing her when she was a teenager, said: “For all of us to have to come to sit on this panel publicly and plead with the Government to change this, there’s something fundamentally wrong with the situation that is being allowed to get to this point.”
Under changes in the Sentencing Act, some 6,000 offenders were set to be let out of prison in September after serving a third of their sentence – rather than half – in a bid to ease prison overcrowding.
Prisoners serving longer sentences of four years or more would be eligible for release at the halfway point of their term, rather than at two-thirds as had previously been the case.
The changes were due to be phased in, beginning with prisoners serving sentences of less than 575 days, going up to inmates jailed for 12 years or more being eligible for early release in June next year.
Carol Higgins, whose father was jailed for 20 years for raping her “nearly every day” for more than two years, said: “Every minute taken off his prison time is a minute added to my fear and anxiety, and a trigger for my complex PTSD.
“I will be forever looking over my shoulder and wondering if he is there whenever I step out of my door. It is outrageous that the Government are minimising the early release by saying it is only a small amount of time off the sentence. Would they minimise it if it was their child who had been raped by a grown man?”
Mrs Badenoch had apologised to victims for not doing enough during the 14 years her party was in Government.
She said: “On the crisis in prison places, this has been a long time coming. We did some things, as I said, it wasn’t enough, and I’m sorry about that.”
She continued: “When we were in Government, we saw the challenge. We created 14,000 prison new prison places, it was nowhere near enough. We had a prison-building target in our manifesto, Covid derailed that programme.”
She said the Conservatives’ own release scheme had exempted “killers, rapists, paedophiles”.
Dr Mullan said Labour had been “fundamentally dishonest” in the way it had presented the policy in the final weeks of Sir Keir Starmer’s government.
He said: “We were all told, the public, victims, that the most serious offenders would be excluded.
“That is the wording that the ministers used, and the ladies here have told me about that, that they heard that, and they believed that, and that’s why they thought that they would never be included in the schemes.
“As we now know, incredibly powerfully illustrated today, that that is simply not true.”
A Labour Party spokesperson, responding to Mrs Badenoch’s press conference, said: “The Tories completely failed to expand prison capacity in government, meaning judges had to stop jailing offenders.
“The Conservatives started the early release scheme because of their own failure and they’ve never said sorry.
“The Government has paused the scheme while an urgent review is conducted. We’re also building thousands of additional jail places on top of the 3,000 we’ve already delivered to restore public confidence in the system and ensure victims of crime get the justice they deserve.”
A Ministry of Justice spokesperson said: “Protecting the public will always be our top priority. That’s why we are taking decisive action to fix the prison crisis we inherited while investing record sums to support victims.
“But after 14 years where prison places increased by just 500, our prisons were days away from running out of places. This would have caused the total breakdown of law and order.
“We are pulling every lever to protect the public and cut crime – building prison places at the fastest rate since the Victorian era, launching the biggest ever expansion of tagging to toughen community punishment and giving victims a say in the strict licence conditions of offenders.
“We have paused changes due to start in September to conduct an urgent review to make sure we get this policy right for victims without running out of prison spaces.”
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