It is a gut-wrenching irony that if one of the greatest collective miscarriages of justice had been corrected years ago, the prisoner release crisis would not now be taking place.
The British prison system seems to work with astonishingly thin margins for error – constantly close to capacity and thus prone to collapse without emergency measures. It is again right now, a fact that has necessitated “decisions no minister would ever want to take”, as the new justice secretary Alex Norris puts it, namely the government’s revised early release scheme to tackle overcrowding in prisons.
