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Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill

I strongly agree. The prisons crisis, to which I shall refer, is one entirely of the Government's own making; for 10 years they have ignored the warnings that the rise in the prison population would outstrip the provision of prison places. The Bill is an inadequate response to that crisis and my hon. Friend is absolutely right. On the one hand, we have measures that the Government claim are intended to reduce the prison population—partly in response to the prison overcrowding crisis—but which many experts are claiming will increase the prison population. On the other, we have measures that the Government admit will increase the prison population. According to the National Association of Probation Officers, the violent offender order, to which I shall return shortly, will add at least 4,000 to the prison population. The Government's own regulatory impact assessment says that breaches of the violent offender orders will have an impact equivalent to approximately 20 places a year. There is an extraordinary discrepancy between these two figures. We need to bear in mind that the Government failed woefully to predict the impact of their own indeterminate sentences. During the Committee stage of the Criminal Justice Bill 2003, the right hon. Member for Leeds, Central (Hilary Benn) predicted that indeterminate sentences would require an additional 900 prison places. The number of people in prison serving indeterminate sentences since then is already at two and a half times that number. In April this year, the figure was at over 2,500, just two years after that sentence was introduced. The Prison Reform Trust has estimated that 12,000 people will be serving indeterminate sentences for public protection by 2012. The gaping hole that is not filled by the Bill and the issue that the Lord Chancellor signally failed to address is that the prisons are full, to bursting point. On Friday, we saw prison numbers rise for the second successive week to a record high. The Government's policy of early release—under which 25,000 criminals are to be released 18 days early on to our streets, under which 6,000 criminals have so far been released, 1,000 of whom were violent offenders and under which many of those have gone on to commit offences while released—has saved only 1,200 prison places. It has been a failure.