Peter Walker

speaker

987 appearances 10 recordings 1 series first heard May 2026 last heard 21 Sep

Peter Walker’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 10 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 3.

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Today in Focus · Prisons are full - who should be released early? · 14 Aug 2026 podcast

We were at a stage where police chiefs were warning that before too long, they wouldn't actually be able to arrest anyone because there'd be nowhere to put them.

And Sunet basically said,

you know, if there's an election coming, it's going to look bad if we release people.

We'll leave it for the next lot.

So there was already an early release of prisoners in 2024, which caused some bad publicity.

thank you, Keir

But I think they accepted there was nothing that could have been done because the alternative

basically having people either not being able to be arrested or rights in prisons or tend to a cell simply wouldn't work.

This is a slightly more longer term thing.

I mean, in brief, because we're sending more people to prison and for longer periods, more people are being jailed.

There's been sentence inflation over the last few decades.

And because of the re-offending rates, a lot more people are being recalled to jail.

I mean, the other thing to point out as well is that a lot of prisoners are in prison because they've been charged for a serious crime and they're waiting for their court date.

And the delays in the crime court systems mean they might be a remand prisoner for several years.

Keir Starmer's government passed a new sentencing bill, which basically said to free up people in prisons, there's going to be this change whereby a lot of categories of prisoners will get out after 50% rather than two thirds.

I mean, this is an interesting thing because there's been less of a fuss made about the non-violent offenders getting out early.

The understandable kind of flurry of publicity and media coverage has been about very serious offenders.

And Andy Burnham has already changed the Keir Starmer plan that he said a few weeks back that he was going to delay the imminent release of prisoners, which is due to start in September 2021.

And that serious sexual offenders, people connected to grooming gangs and other things like that, they were not going to get out.

But the key issue, which has kind of bitten him slightly, is the fact that people convicted of manslaughter would still be eligible for this, partly because there's quite a lot of people who would fall under that category and they need to free up the prison spaces.

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