𝓤𝓷𝓲𝓽𝓮𝓭 𝓝𝓮𝔀𝓼

Cherie Blair’s blast at the PM over holding dangerous men in women’s prisons is the last thing Andy Burnham needs. The fact that a government is on the verge of setting prisoners free early is proof the British state is failing. Now, the prime minister is warned he risks “solving the crisis in men’s prisons at the expense of women”.

Lady Blair, a top lawyer and KC who was by Sir Tony Blair’s side as he won three successive election victories, fears women are in danger of becoming “collateral damage”. This is not how the new prime minister would want to mark his first month in the job. Back in 1993, Sir Tony, then Shadow Home Secretary, summed up his approach as both “tough on crime” and “tough on the causes of crime”.

In the eyes of many Britons, Mr Burnham is about to release the “causes of crime” back onto the streets before they have paid anything like their debt to society. This smacks of a travesty of justice. The Labour leader has set off further alarm bells by floating the idea of “making greater use of the entire prison estate including using the female estate for male offenders”.

Lady Blair described his proposals as “troubling”. She fears that if women’s prisons are closed, women will be moved “further from their children and families”; she says they must not be released into “homelessness or back into abusive relationships”. And she warns that any notion of holding men inside women’s prisons is “even more troubling”. She states that many women have “experienced domestic abuse, sexual violence, coercion or other forms of male violence” and there is the danger of “retraumatising” them.

In England and Wales, there were 3,350 women prisoners at the end of June. This was less than 4% of the prison population, but there is the makings of a fiasco here. Rival parties are offering alternative solutions to the overcrowding crisis. Nigel Farage has suggested prison spaces could be rented in El Salvador; Reform says “Nightingale” prisons could be built – a reference to the hospitals constructed at remarkable speed during the pandemic.

Any number of proposals which do not involve letting thugs back into the communities they blighted will win a hearing from a public that worries the country is going in the wrong direction. Modern British history is littered with fiascoes but early releases smacks of not just a failure to build enough prison spaces, but a failure to distinguish right from wrong.

It is one thing for Mr Burnham to come under attack from Mr Farage and the Right; it is quite another to receive such stinging criticism from Lady Blair, a liberal icon from the New Labour age.

Mr Burnham has said it is “simply not possible to prevent all offenders from being released early without the prison system collapsing”. He should remember that keeping citizens safe – whether women in the prison estate or ordinary Britons trying to get through each day – is a matter of social justice as well as criminal justice.