Women’s Aid issue warning as more than 1,500 prisoners across the country are set to be released under the Early Release Scheme 

Isabelle Younane, Head of External Affairs at Women’s Aid, said:

“Tomorrow the Government are expected to release around 1,700 prisoners across the country as part of the Early Release Scheme. We recognise that overcrowding is a serious issue that the Government needs to take urgent action to address, however, Women’s Aid is concerned that the policy is coming at the price of safety for women and children. 

We have been assured that prisoners convicted of sexual and some domestic abuse offences will not be among those released, but sadly we are hearing from our member services across the country that many perpetrators are slipping through the net, having been convicted of other related offences, such as assault. The early release of perpetrators will have a detrimental impact on both the physical safety and mental wellbeing of survivors, who have been able to live in safety and begun to rebuild their lives free from fear while their abuser was in prison. 

The Early Release Scheme relies heavily on an already overstretched and struggling probation service, and we fear that the release of such high volumes of prisoners at once will push them to breaking point. For a long time, we’ve been warning that probation services across the country are already failing to safeguard survivors, with inadequate monitoring and poor risk assessing of perpetrators. Inconsistencies in probation services across the country also means that there is a mixed picture when it comes to how specialist domestic abuse services are involved with safety planning -with many being left out of the process entirely. As an average of one woman a week is killed by a current or former partner, proper monitoring, evaluating and safety planning can be a matter of life and death. 

As well as providing expert knowledge, specialist domestic abuse services also provide much needed support to survivors. Fears over the early release of potentially dangerous perpetrators, and a failing probation system, mean that these services will face additional strain as survivors reach out for help. Decades of chronic underfunding has left many of these services close to their limits and there is an urgent need for the government to provide the resources needed to ensure that survivors continue to be supported during this challenging time and beyond.  

Women’s Aid welcomes the Government’s manifesto commitment to halve violence against women and girls in the next 10 years, but policies like this, which will directly impact women and girls, are a cause for concern.  For this scheme to avoid dire consequences for women and children, we need to see proper resourcing of probation services so that they have the capacity to carry out thorough risk assessments and adequately monitor those released, alongside co-operation with expert organisations and funding for the specialist domestic abuse services that support survivors.  

The upcoming Spending Review provides the opportunity for the government to renew their commitments towards women and girls, and we hope to see the appropriate measures taken in this to mitigate the risk that the Early Release Scheme poses to survivors.”