Jessie Cole and Albert Bowers, who were sentenced in 2020 to 13 years for manslaughter, are due to be freed in January under the existing plans. Photograph: Thames Valley police/PA View image in fullscreen Jessie Cole and Albert Bowers, who were sentenced in 2020 to 13 years for manslaughter, are due to be freed in January under the existing plans. Photograph: Thames Valley police/PA UK criminal justice Burnham ‘increasingly confident’ PC Harper’s killers will not get early release Prime minister says he has asked justice secretary to push through measures to increase the number of prison places
Prefer the Guardian on Google Andy Burnham has said he is increasingly confident he can adapt the early release scheme for prisoners to exclude the killers of PC Andrew Harper and other serious offenders, saying he understood and shared the public’s concern about their potential release.
Writing on Facebook , the prime minister said on Tuesday he had asked the justice secretary, Alex Norris, to rapidly push through a series of measures to increase the number of prison places, requiring fewer people to be released early to free up room.
Downing Street said on Monday that there was no feasible way of exempting just a handful of prisoners from the scheme to block the release of Jessie Cole and Albert Bowers, who were sentenced to 13 years for Harper’s manslaughter.
The pair were due to be freed in January under plans to release about 5,000 people early under an emergency plan to create more space in the prison estate in England and Wales.
Exemptions were made for those convicted of rape, serious child sexual abuse and grooming offences, but not manslaughter, prompting pressure to block the release of Harper’s killers, including from police and his family.
View image in fullscreen PC Andrew Harper. Photograph: Thames Valley police/PA No 10 had already changed stance, saying Burnham has asked Norris to “work through further options to keep a greater number of the most serious offenders in prison, including the killers of PC Harper”.
In his Facebook post, Burnham said the early release scheme could be mitigated by expanding prison places in three ways: removing foreign offenders more quickly; finding a way to release lower-risk prisoners stuck in jail on indeterminate sentences; and “making greater use of the entire prison estate including using the female estate for male offenders”.
He wrote: “I am increasingly confident that a more focused approach along these lines will allow us to reduce the number of people released early and, in the case of the most serious offenders like those convicted of the killing of PC Harper, prevent their early release altogether.
“In advance of the justice secretary’s proposals being presented to parliament, we will seek to engage other political parties in discussions with the aim of gaining the widest possible public and political consensus on the approach being taken.”
Burnham wrote that he understood “the depth of public concern about the potential early release of those involved with the killing of PC Andrew Harper – and I share it”.
“I fully appreciate the anguish of Andrew’s family and, more broadly, of all those victims and their families who may see those who caused them such harm not serve their full sentence. It is incumbent on me as prime minister to do everything within my power to minimise that possibility. And I am determined to do so.”
Speaking later during a visit in Derbyshire, Burnham said…