Freed prisoners commit record number of violent crimes. Chief inspector of probation orders nationwide inspection as ‘broken’ penal system fails to rehabilitate inmates

12 comments

1. “Almost **900 serious crimes** have been recorded in the past year as being committed by offenders under supervision of probation after being released from jail or while serving community sentences.

   It is the highest number since records began, and accounts for at **least one murder** and **two rapes every week** of the year.

   Offences also include attempted murder, manslaughter, sexual assaults, arson, kidnapping and causing death by driving or with a stolen vehicle.

   Official data showed there were 872 notifications of serious further offences by criminals released from jail or serving community sentences in 2024-25, up 13 per cent from 770 the previous year and 51 per cent on 577 in the year before that.

   The notifications for 2023-24 had translated into 357 convictions for serious further offences including 56 murders – equivalent to one a week – and 107 rapes, equivalent to two a week. This was a 14 per cent rise on the previous year.

   It emerged in October that a man convicted of knife crime and freed from prison under Labour’s early release scheme had been charged with murder in London.“

2. Maybe start punishing instead of “rehabilitating”. The gentle touch doesn’t work with people that have 0 interest in being a good person.

3. Until we can rehabilitate…we should imprison. Prison should, first and foremost, be there to keep us safe. The intellectual idea that we can fix people is nice and once we should aspire to…but until we get there…we need to keep people safe.

   I’m not saying we need to be as extreme but if you look at the crime rate in el Salvador before and after they locked up the criminals….

   At this stage I suspect…anyone not living online or being a pro police or pro labour or indeed pro tory shill wouldn’t mind going back a few years when we didn’t have GPS trackers of packs of cheese….but hey…the stats say crime is down…but everything we see tells us they aren’t.

4. It’s almost like making prisoners only serve 1/3 of their custodial sentence acts as no deterrence.

   We need more/bigger prisons.

   I remember watching a Louis Theroux documentary years ago about a US prison. They were running out of space so they just bought the land next door and stuck a huge fence around it and built a load of tents, I think the inmates called it ‘tent city’.

   The prisoners preferred being in tent city as they had more freedom and felt safer.

   Perhaps that’s the approach we should take. Rather than focussing on the small cell approach packed with TVs and PlayStation’s.

5. Are you telling me that rehabilitation of violent career criminals DOESN’T work?

6. This is just another example of the damage of not investing in UK infrastructure and services. All uk services have been run into the ground so now we have extra costs. Austerity was so fucking expensive for the uk it is ridiculous.

7. I don’t think the public are really aware of how bad the crisis is in probation. 4 officers have been seriously hurt this year. Probation starting pay is like £25k to manage something like 60 offenders in the community.

   The pay deal probation staff did have ran out in October and a new one hasn’t been agreed. I don’t think people realise how over worked and underpaid the probation service is nor the risk they face.

8. The penal system is not a deterrent for those institutionalized prisoners. It’s a way of life . Each subsequent custodial sentence should be tougher than the last in terms of hard labour and fewer privileges. This must be imbalanced with real opportunity for rehabilitation for prisoners who actually want to change.

9. Let’s have a British CECOT. Come out of prison and reoffend and that’s where you go. 

10. Prison doesn’t work, all the evidence shows this

11. We all know where this is heading. We can’t afford to keep them locked up because there isn’t enough money being invested into the existing prison system. This is because the government is shifting us more and more towards private, for-profit prison systems like in America.

    Where there is profit to be made, the state will defund the socialised version and sell it off to their buddies in private enterprise, whether that is the railways, energy, healthcare, or prisons. If it ain’t nailed down, it’s getting sold eventually.

12. Well we are at the point now where it’s just the new normal, there is that many people that do their time, then get thrown/rotated back out into a system that doesn’t support them, and ends in their only option being crime again (bar the ones that have lost the plot and can only see crime as the option now).

    It’s not going to get better any time soon, so expect it to get worse.

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