About 650 prisoners will leave jails across England and Wales on Tuesday in the second phase of the government's early-release scheme to reduce overcrowding.
The offenders are serving sentences of up to two and a half years. Under the new rules, they leave after completing a third of their sentence rather than half. The first phase released around 700 prisoners on October 1 serving sentences under 19 months. Subsequent releases will gradually include those serving longer terms, with the final batch in June comprising prisoners serving more than 12 years.
Those released typically face electronic tagging and other monitoring conditions for the remaining two-thirds of their sentence while under probation supervision in the community.
Probation officers' union Napo says the releases have strained its members. The union is preparing for a vote next week that could trigger strike action over pay and workload. The Ministry of Justice offered probation officers a 5% pay rise. Napo had demanded 12% to compensate for earnings lost to funding cuts since 2010. Two other unions have accepted the offer, which the MoJ says is fair. The government is simultaneously investing 700 million pounds to hire 1,300 additional probation officers and deploy AI tools to reduce monitoring workload.
Separately, the government is bringing revised criminal court reforms back to Parliament after abandoning its most controversial element. The original plan proposed judges sitting alone without juries to decide verdicts in cases with sentences up to three years. The revised version drops this but retains jury trial scraps for complex fraud cases and removes defendants' automatic right to request jury trials, keeping 5,500 additional cases in lower magistrates courts.
The government plans to expand "blitz" courts that group similar cases together to accelerate processing. A pilot at the Old Bailey halved London's backlog of 500 assault cases against emergency workers over summer.
The government accepted more than 150 of 180 recommendations from a review by former appeal judge Sir Brian Leveson to modernise courts. It rejected his advice to cap magistrates' sentencing at 12 months, instead raising it to two years to divert cases from Crown Court and reduce backlogs. The government ordered pilots allowing defendants to appear directly from police cells rather than being transported to courtrooms.