The government’s domestic abuse early release scheme for England and Wales came into force today, freeing an estimated 700 prisoners in its first wave, with a further 3,800 scheduled to follow over the coming year, according to the BBC. The exclusions written into the scheme tell you almost everything you need to know about whose safety was considered, and whose was not.
Under the plan, prisoners serving sentences of up to 19 months become eligible for release after serving a third of that time. The government adjusted the original framework, set under Andy Burnham’s predecessor Sir Keir Starmer, to ensure those convicted of rape, grooming and child sex offences would not qualify. It is, taken on its own terms, a concession. But it is a concession with a very conspicuous gap running through the middle of it.
What the Scheme Does Not Cover
Perpetrators of domestic abuse are not excluded from the domestic abuse early release provisions. According to Women’s Aid, there is no exclusion for domestic abuse-related offences including common assault, controlling or coercive behaviour, non-fatal strangulation, stalking and harassment. Read that list slowly. These are not peripheral or technical offences. They are the architecture of intimate partner violence: the escalating pattern that, in the most serious cases, ends in a woman’s death.
Most domestic abuse offenders will have expected to spend 40% of their sentence behind bars, with the remainder served in the community. The early release scheme compresses even that. Victims who organised their lives, their housing, their children’s routines around a known release date are now working to a different clock, one they were not warned about.
A Commissioner’s Condemnation
Dame Nicole Jacobs, the domestic abuse commissioner for England and Wales, has not been measured in her response. She called the scheme ‘shameful’ and said she had received ‘no assurance that the danger perpetrators pose has been properly considered and assessed with meaningful input from victims.’ That is an extraordinary statement from a commissioner whose entire role is to hold the system to account on precisely this question. The fact that she has had to make it publicly, rather than being consulted meaningfully before the policy was finalised, is its own answer.
There is a particular cruelty to the position this places victims in. The women most at risk from domestic abuse offenders are also, by the nature of the crime, the women least likely to be at a safe remove from their abusers. They have not moved countries. They often live in the same town, use the same streets, share children and therefore share ongoing legal contact. An abstract prison population statistic lands very differently when the person being released knows where you live.
The Structural Problem Behind the Numbers
England and Wales’s prison system is under sustained pressure, and no serious person disputes the need to find relief. But the choices made within a crisis reveal priorities, and this one reveals that the architects of the scheme drew a clear line between sexual violence and domestic violence, treating the latter as categorically less grave. Coercive control, non-fatal strangulation, stalking: these are not minor offences. The Crown Prosecution Service has spent years building the legal and cultural case that they are serious ones. Today’s release schedule sits in uncomfortable tension with that work.
The 3,800 prisoners due to follow this first cohort over the next year means the question of domestic abuse early release will not resolve itself quickly. Each subsequent wave will require the same scrutiny: who is being released, what risk assessments were conducted, and whether victims were informed with adequate time to make themselves safe. Dame Nicole Jacobs’s call for meaningful victim input, made publicly because it was not heeded privately, sets the terms for that accountability. The government now has to decide whether it will meet them.
