When darkness falls, it’s time to bolt the doors. Check the windows, test the locks; circle the house, then anxiously check all over again. The phone must always be by the pillow, just in case. And the slightest noise, if you manage to sleep, will inevitably jolt you awake.
It’s a nightly routine that will be familiar to many survivors of domestic violence, for whom the initial sweet relief of seeing their attacker sent to jail may be swiftly followed by the fear of what might happen once he is released. He knows where you lived, but also where to look: where you work or where your children go to school, where your family and friends are. The dangerous intimacy of a once-shared life keeps survivors looking nervously over their shoulders for years. And that’s why this week’s early release of around 1,700 prisoners – a decision forced on this government, to its palpable fury, by years of Conservative governments recklessly failing to build enough prison places to hold them – has set so many survivors on edge.
Shabana Mahmood, the justice secretary, insists ministers have taken “every step and every mechanism” to weed domestic abusers out of the early release programme, as well as excluding sex offenders, stalkers and those serving more than four years for the most serious offences. However, domestic violence charities say the exemptions won’t catch everyone – including prisoners jailed for some other offence, but who also have a history of abusing their partners – and the domestic abuse commissioner, Nicole Jacobs, says all the uncertainty is causing some survivors “sleepless nights”.
It will be cold comfort to know that the alternatives were probably worse. This week we learned that the outgoing justice secretary, Alex Chalk, reportedly warned Rishi Sunak that if the government didn’t start a mass prison release programme by mid-June they’d have to “get down on their knees and pray”. Instead, Sunak called an election just in time to make it someone else’s problem. Keir Starmer’s government was left with an impossible choice between releasing some inmates after serving 40% rather than the usual 50% of their sentence, or leaving judges physically unable to send the guilty down – which in turn would have risked a complete breakdown in law and order, as violent offenders realised they were in effect untouchable. The least bad option was this rushed exodus, alarming not just for the public but also for some more vulnerable offenders kicked out in a hurry with no home or job to go to. Though Mahmood suggested some could be housed in budget hotels if necessary, one newly ex-inmate told journalists waiting outside the prison gates he expected to be sleeping on a park bench.
Though in theory probation officers are supposed to be keeping a watchful eye on all this, in practice they were barely keeping up even in normal times. This week, the Conservative MP Alicia Kearns raised in parliament the case of a constituent whose abusive husband was recently released on condition that he was tagged and banned from entering the village where she lived. But he wasn’t tagged, Kearns said – apparently her constituent was told probation officers had run out of tags – and within hours of leaving prison he had arrived in her village. “He was on her street, and his family knocked on her door,” said Kearns. It’s a reminder that in acknowledging the seriousness of what is happening this week, there’s a danger of hopelessly rose-tinting what went before.
In theory, prisoners released on the usual timetable should be better prepared to rejoin the outside world than those booted out to make room in a hurry. In reality, there was precious little rehabilitation happening at the best of times in prisons where inmates could be locked up for 22 hours out of 24, and the probation service has for years now been drowning in what its former chief inspector, Justin Russell, last year called “chronic staffing shortages at every grade, which have led to what staff perceive to be unmanageable workloads”. It was shocking to hear his successor, Martin Jones, tell the BBC this week that some of those freed early will inevitably reoffend but it shouldn’t be surprising, given the routine reoffending rate in England and Wales is 26.5%. What’s really changed this week, in other words, is that failings long hidden behind closed doors are now right out there in plain sight.
A diehard optimist would argue that sometimes a country needs to hit rock bottom to know which way is up; that a crisis might just prod us into doing what needs to be done. The idea that being open about how bad things are is the first step to fixing them is certainly becoming a theme of this government, from Rachel Reeves’s brutally frank assessment of the nation’s finances to Wes Streeting’s approach to the NHS – and the surprisingly enlightened appointment of prison reformer James Timpson as prisons minister, which suggests that the government is ready to confront some uncomfortable truths about sentencing. But if we’re to have the “much bigger conversation about who we are sending to prison, for how long, and what we want prisoners to do while they are inside” that the audibly exasperated chief inspector of prisons, Charlie Taylor, calls for in his latest annual report, the public has to feel reassured that they’ll be safe. Too many women, over the coming days and nights, will be feeling anything but.
Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist
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