The Green and the Great Sentencing Confidence Trick
Andy Burnham was right to pause early prisoner releases. Now he should end the dishonest sentencing system that tells the public one thing while quietly doing another.
Imagine climbing into bed tonight and taking a long look at the person beside you. Husband, wife, partner, duvet thief. Sleep well, because when people are murdered the person responsible is often not a tattooed stranger behind a bus stop but somebody they know. We talk about “killers” as though they are identical. They are not. During my legal training I knew of a woman who waited for her husband to return from the pub and stabbed him as he entered their home. She did not go to prison. He habitually came home, beat her and raped her. The law recognised the difference. Taking a life cannot be reduced to one word and one moral category.
Which brings me, by a route only a Brummie could regard as direct, to Andy Burnham. The Prime Minister has paused plans due to begin in September that could have allowed thousands of prisoners out earlier than the public expected. The row erupted when it emerged that Albert Bowers and Jessie Cole, each serving thirteen years for the manslaughter of PC Andrew Harper, might benefit. Harper, a 28-year-old Thames Valley officer, was dragged to his death behind a getaway car after responding to a quad-bike theft. His widow called the prospect deplorable. Burnham stopped, listened and ordered an urgent review. Good. Politicians tell us they are listening while continuing in the same direction. Pressing pause was not weakness. It was sensible.
Here in Birmingham, prison is not an abstract Whitehall concept. We have The Green, as Brummies know HMP Birmingham. When inspectors arrived in October 2025 it held 976 men, only 21 below its reduced capacity. Around 5,000 passed through its gates in a year and 222 were released each month. Most were on remand, unsentenced or recalled. The Green is New Street Station with higher walls and worse coffee. Yet inspectors found nineteen prisoners had been released after their lawful date. Ministers were preparing to let some people out too early while Birmingham managed to keep others too long. If British justice entered the Olympics, it would finish fourth in a three-horse race.
The national prison population stood at 87,342 on 31 March 2026, including 16,025 on remand. Those are not decorative figures. They mean crowded cells, exhausted officers, delayed transfers and neighbourhoods receiving people back without proper preparation. In Birmingham, every release eventually becomes somebody’s neighbour, passenger, employee or the chap behind you in Aldi with frozen chips. The object is not to lock every offender away forever. It is to punish properly, protect the public and reduce the chance of another victim.
I could begin solving much of this overnight with a thing governments treat as faintly obscene: money. Whenever anybody suggests spending on justice, somebody cries “waste”. Waste? Do me a favour. Look in your kitchen bin at the food you bought and never ate. Open your wardrobe and count the shirts, frocks, jackets and shoes unseen since Theresa May was prime minister. Humans waste money. Governments do too, often after commissioning a report explaining why they need another report. The question is whether spending properly on justice costs less than overcrowding, reoffending, emergency releases, ruined lives and victims carrying the consequences long after the Treasury congratulates itself on a saving.
We need a quality prison estate, courts capable of trying cases promptly, properly funded probation, addiction treatment, education, useful work and experienced prison officers paid enough to stay. We treated experienced officers and their knowledge as expensive inconveniences. Then we wondered why prisons became harder to control and replacing experience proved more difficult than replacing a light bulb. Money alone will not reform every offender, and cells are no substitute for preventing crime. But neither can we empty prisons to disguise the fact that we refused to provide enough space and staff. Early release is not weather drifting in from Wales. It is a political decision produced by earlier political decisions.
What angers people most is the twisted language of sentencing. A judge announces fifteen years. Television reports fifteen years. The victim’s family hears fifteen years and the public assumes the offender will spend fifteen years in prison. Then the machinery hums behind the curtain and fifteen becomes seven and a half, or something else, with the rest served on licence. The system understands the calculation. The public discovers it years later, usually because a notorious case breaks through the fog. That is not transparent justice. It is sordid public-relations sentencing: a fierce number for the cameras and another in the small print.
We Brummies are straightforward. Tell us five years and we assume five years. Tell us fifteen and we assume fifteen. I want courts to sentence as the public reasonably understands sentencing, while recognising that not all crimes, killers or circumstances are alike. Announce plainly the minimum time to be served in custody and the total period under sentence. Put both figures in the judge’s remarks and every report. Let victims know the tariff. Let offenders know it. Let government know exactly what it is doing in our name. No hidden arithmetic, no ministerial conjuring trick and no justice carrying an asterisk saying terms and conditions apply.
Andy Burnham was right to pause September’s releases. Now I hope he goes further and stops the confidence trick that made them possible. If honest sentencing requires more prison places, build them. If it requires more well-paid officers, recruit them. Justice is expensive, but injustice sends a larger bill to victims, families, police and communities. I do not want cop killers serving a few years because Whitehall failed to provide enough cells. Nor do I want every person who causes a death treated as morally identical. I want judgment, punishment, rehabilitation and plain English. Burnham has pressed pause. He should now press reset, because justice does not become cheaper when government shortens the sentence. It merely sends the bill somewhere else.
Richard, you are right to challengege the word “pause”. Burnham cannot simply announce that an Act of Parliament no longer applies, and once a statutory release provision is in force he must obey it. My understanding, however, is that the September provisions have not yet been fully brought into operation, so the Government can lawfully delay their commencement while the review takes place, or return to Parliament and amend the Act. A press release alone would be meaningless; the pause only matters if it is followed by the necessary regulations or legislation. That is why I welcome Burnham stopping to reconsider it, but I will judge him by what he now does rather than by the announcement. If he does neither, your criticism will have been entirely justified.
I find your comments Mike as interesting but also odd. First when is a pause a pause and when is it not and when is it a breach of the law. it was only 12 months ago when this Labour Government passed a new law allowing the early release of more serious offenders, including those found guilty of rape and manslaughter. This September coming that law is due to be activated. Burnham cannot stop that happening so his review and pause does nothing except what? Delay no … since I am sure the lawyers will be out in force demanding the law recently passed be enforced. He could recall parliament and change the law but he does not want scrutiny of his nonexistent policies… as a former prison visitor you raise the issue of what is prison for? Surely its first job is to protect the public from criminals… second it is a punishment and third and last it is for rehabilitation…. The third is the least important… because it is of the three the least effective. This is not because of the facilities. They have improved enormously since I was a prison visitor… gone are prison uniforms… gone are internal punishments… instead we have officers that no longer give badly behaved prisoners a good kicking but behave like social workers. For all this kid glove treatment most prisoners will leave prison and reoffend within three years. The element of fear, fear of prison life, has long gone. The stats are there…. Most of those who had previous early release either went on to reoffend or were recalled early for failure to observe tagging rules such as drinking alcohol, which the newer tags can recognise. Why do they reoffend? Joblessness is an important issue. Few companies will employ ex cons. Even Timpsons, the brothers I know well, do not employ young ex cons, because it is too risky. And joblessness promotes a chaotic lifestyle. A multiplicity of reasons… drink, drugs, a chaotic life style, joblessness, and of course the fact that crime pays! When only 7% of crimes are solved by the police why bother being law abiding when you can earn a lot more law breaking… and you will generally get away with your crime because here in BIRMINGHAM most assaults, most robberies, are not investigated at all. I know of several cases of violent assaults, robbery, and muggings where the police here came to the hospital, gave the person a crime number, went away and that was it. So crime pays…
Then you mention Brummies as if they are a uniform group… clearly there is now no such thing as Brummie anymore. As for HMP Birmingham I know of few who call it the Green… it is simply Winson Green.
Racial and financial divisions have destroyed the uniformity of attitudes to law and order. The recent incident of a white lad being arrested after being attacked by Asian Youths here in Birmingham city centre reveals how the police no longer enforce the law uniformly. At the same time increasingly the whole judicial process is viewed as being biased towards minorities and towards offenders. Thugs have become vulnerable people. Thus when I speak to people in Birmingham I hear them express the view that the first job of the law, to keep law abiding citizens safe, no longer exists. This they refer to as “it doesn’t work for them” early release of prisoners reinforces this view. Labour moans that the last Tory government left it with over full prisons. They fail to understand that every prison place this government has opened was built under the last government and but for COVID would have been opened long ago. Sadly it takes five years in this country to build a prison. This government also fails to mention that there are three prisons that are empty today that could be used, but have been deemed by this administration unfit for use.