Someone on the comms side inside UK Government notoriously described 9-11, 2001 as a good day to bury bad news. On the reverse, August is the worst month to leave bad news unburied, because little news is around โ unless nature obliges with wildfires or earthquakes, or perhaps an avalanche in the southern hemisphere. What news is around, the press keeps its teeth sunk into it, namely the (even earlier) early release scheme for prisoners, or in the jargon the โSentencing Act progression modelโ.
Yesterday, August 10, the Daily Mail led on the 89,000 crimes that those released after 40 and not 50 per cent of their jail terms can be predicted to commit. Other outlets continue to feature victims of crime and the bereaved who understandably do not like criminals who hurt them let out of prison early. The bad publicity was entirely predictable, just as the cynical โreviewโ ordered by the new Prime Minister Andy Burnham made no real difference to the โmodelโ. Letting criminals out of prison ever earlier is the way that both main political parties, Labour and Conservative, have sought to keep prisons from overcrowding.
Grotesque league
At least the controversy showed a grotesque league table of which crimes are deemed worse than others and prisoners ought to serve a little longer of their sentences: worst are sex and violence. That nothing was said about fraud (the largest volume crime in the UK), and shoplifting was even named by some as less serious, was telling. The message for business to take: they have to look to themselves to deter, prevent and investigate theft from them. For shops and high streets, that means business crime reduction partnerships as regularly featured in Professional Security Magazine (and more in the September 2026 edition).
Both main parties
What else ought businesses to take from this affair? Because both main political parties are committed to managing the prison population in this way, even if it makes a mockery of the criminal justice system. As the Conservative David Gauke put it in the independent sentencing review for Labour published in May 2025, the task is โto put the prison population on a sustainable footingโ. Regardless of any deeper question of how many criminals the UK has, and how many ought to be detained for the good of the public โ which would have an economic benefit of lowering the cost of crime, despite the cost of incarceration.
Pointlessness of more laws
One thing for trade bodies such as the British Retail Consortium and trade unions such as the shopworkersโ union Usdaw to learn is that legal remedies are cosmetic at most. Gauke in his review touched on the Assaults on Emergency Workers (Offences) Act (AEW) 2018, which makes it a separate offence to assault an emergency worker. As if the law already on assault is not enough. Yet the trend has been for interest groups to seek similar exceAptions. After much campaigning by the likes of the BRC and Usdaw, retail workers got such a law from Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour in the Crime and Policing Act 2026, as praised by Labour-supporting Usdaw. Gauke wrote: โWhile it is unacceptable for any emergency worker to be assaulted undertaking their duties, evidence does not suggest that AEW legislation has had a deterrent effect.โ And if the prisons are full, why add to filling them?!
Conspiracy theorist or liberal?
The thrust of penal policy as set out by Gauke will affect businesses and wider society. For example Gauke wrote: โGovernment should consider where facial recognition technology could be integrated into specific locations or more widely in public to improve management of some offenders in the community,โ in other words, to avoid imprisoning criminals. This lends itself to conspiracy theories that society is one large open prison, where the boundaries (so far as the state is concerned) between everyone and the criminal is blurred. Yet liberals can pluck as much from Gauke โ who spoke much of rehabilitation and addressing the โroot causes of offendingโ. Gauke at least as arguably set forth a liberal approach to criminal justice, proposing an โindependent body external to governmentโ to โadvise on the impacts of current and future policy decisions relating to prison and probation resourcesโ, arguing for best practice and evidence to reduce reoffending. ย You can even paint Gauke as a dry Benthamite, even. In recent comments on the controversy, on Arguably, a Substack publication, Gauke has reiterated how Britain in terms of its prisons is ‘in denial’ and โliving beyond its meansโ; early, even emergency, release is unavoidable, albeit distressing for victims and difficult for the politician in decision-making power.
Below threshold
Except that a further trouble for retailers is that โ as they report everywhere, in nice seaside places and run-down cities alike โ a known cohort of neโer-do-wells steal (for no-one denies the UK has an epidemic of retail crime), threaten and altogether make life a misery. Their thefts and anti-social behaviour falls below the threshold of prison.
Photo by Mark Rowe: Inverness Prison wall
