Intriguing criminal justice reform talk from across the pond from new UK prime minister

Realizing that, conincidently on US Independence Day, the Brisish elected a new Partiment and Prime Minister, I was epsecially intrigued by this new BBC article headlined "We have too many prisoners, says new PM Starmer." I recommend the piece in full, and here are excerpts:

Sir Keir Starmer has said he wants to reduce the number of people going to prison through renewed efforts to cut reoffending.

In his first press conference as prime minister, Sir Keir said too many people found themselves back in jail "relatively quickly" after being sent there. He added that intervening to prevent young people committing knife crime would be an early priority for his new government.

But he said there would be no "overnight solution" to prison overcrowding, adding: "We’ve got too many prisoners, not enough prisons."

It comes after he appointed a businessman as his prisons minister who has previously said only a third of prisoners should be there. James Timpson, boss of the shoe repair chain which has a policy of recruiting ex-offenders, said in an interview with Channel 4 earlier this year that "we're addicted to punishment”.

Labour, which won a landslide general election victory on Thursday, has promised to review sentencing after regaining office for the first time since 2010. It has also inherited a ballooning crisis in Britain's jails, and has already committed to keeping the previous Conservative government's early release scheme in place to ease current levels of overcrowding. Last week the Prison Governors’ Association, which represents 95% of prison governors in England and Wales, warned that jails were due to run out of space within days.

Tory ex-justice secretary Alex Chalk first announced plans to release prisoners early in October 2023. Mr Chalk, who lost his seat to the Lib Dems in the general election, told MPs at the time the "prison population is greater than it has ever been" and the UK "must use prison better". However, he added: "We must do whatever it takes to always ensure there are always enough prison places to lock up the most dangerous offenders to keep the British public safe."

Details of Labour's review are yet to be unveiled, but Mr Timpson's appointment has offered an early signal that a change of approach may be on the cards in this area. Sir Keir has appointed him a member of the House of Lords, allowing him to take up a post as prisons minister at the Ministry of Justice. The businessman told a Channel 4 podcast in February that prison was a "disaster" for around a third of prisoners, and another third "probably shouldn’t be there".

He said too many people being in prison for "far too long" was an example of "evidence being ignored because there is this sentiment around punish and punish”. "We’re addicted to sentencing, we’re addicted to punishment," he added.

Asked about his comments at a Downing Street press conference, Sir Keir did not offer a view on whether he agreed with those estimates. But he added: "We do need to be clear about the way in which we use prisons. “For so many people [who] come out of prison, they’re back in prison relatively quickly afterwards.

“That is a massive problem that we have in this country, that we do need to break." He said his party wanted to cut knife crime in particular, and cited his plan to set up a network of "youth hubs".

Sir Keir, a former lawyer, added: “I’ve sat in the back of I don’t know how many criminal courts and watched people processed through the system on an escalator to go into prison. “I’ve often reflected that many of them could have been taken out of that system earlier if they’d had support”....

Labour says it wants to create 20,000 prison places by enabling ministers to override local councils on planning decisions. But it also plans to keep in place the scheme implemented by the last government under which some lower-level offenders can be released up to 70 days early.

Sir Keir said Conservative ministers had created a "mess" by failing to build enough prisons and mismanaging the prisons budget. Defending his decision to keep the early-release scheme in place, he added: "We don’t have the prisons we need, and I can’t build a prison within 24 hours."

The latest official figures, published on Friday, put the prison population of England and Wales at 87,453 out of a "useable operational capacity" of 88,864.

For a very rough sense of American proportions, I believe Florida has a prison population over 80,000 prisons (as well as many tens of thousands more in local jail).  But Florida's overall population is roughly one third of the overallpopulation in England and Wales. In other words, Florida's incarceration rate is about three times the prison population rate getting this attention from national leadership accross the pond.

Put another way for another point of comparison, if the overall US incarceration rate was similar to the rate in England and Wales, we would expect the national US prison population to be around 450,000 persons.  In fact, it is currently amlmost three times that large, checking in these days at around 1.25 million people.  And yet I am certainly not expecting to hear from any of our national leaders anytime soon that "We have too many prisoners."