Labour is set to free killers and rapists from jail earlier under a new soft-justice masterplan.
The Government’s sentencing review was last night savaged by victims and senior police officers, while the Tories dubbed it a ‘recipe for a crimewave’.
The plan contains a raft of measures to slash sentences served by prisoners – from shoplifters to killers – by up to a third.
Justice Secretary Shabana Mahmood, who commissioned the review to free up space in overcrowded prisons, is poised to become the weakest law and order minister in history by allowing thousands more criminals a year to dodge jail completely.
Most of the plan has already been adopted in principle by Labour. Tory frontbencher Robert Jenrick blasted the measures as ‘a get-out-of-jail-free card for dangerous criminals’.
‘It’s a recipe for a crime wave,’ the Shadow Justice Secretary told MPs in the Commons. ‘The Labour Party are clearly ideologically opposed to prison.
‘The radical, terrible changes today may be cloaked in necessity, but the root of them is their ideology. And it’s the public who will pay the price for their weakness.’
The review said criminals convicted of serious violence or sex offences could win their freedom after serving half their jail term, rather than at the current three-quarters point – a one-third reduction.
This lower automatic release date would apply to offenders convicted of ‘rape, manslaughter, soliciting murder, attempted murder and wounding with intent to cause grievous bodily harm’, the document said, providing they behaved well in jail.
Most other offenders would be released after serving just a third of their sentence if they demonstrated good behaviour.
Hellbound and Down 