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

And you have to have weeks to prepare, not only the probation for the prisoners getting out, you have to tell the victims of a crime.

And doing it in a short space of time is very tricky.

And there have been warnings that one of the things that could happen if it's rushed too much is you get even more of prisoners who should not be released, who are potentially still a danger to the public, being freed just because they get the wrong name.

And this happens a lot.

I think in the last year for which there were statistics, there was about 250 prisoners released in error across England and Wales.

I mean, a lot of them are people who may be just out a week early.

It's not a big thing, but it's happened an awful lot.

The risk does seem to be if you rush this or try and compress the timetable too much, then it could happen even more often.

He said at the time it was for family reasons.

He'd done the job for two years.

He felt he'd done what he could.

But the subtext seemed to be that this was someone who was used to running things as a business and found that government is a lot more difficult.

And particularly with prisons, I mean, to go back to your original question, how do we solve the problem?

Mm-hmm.

I mean, most experts on this would agree you solve the problem if politicians start to be realistic with the public and say sending more and more people to prison is costing a huge amount of money, creating a huge amount of chaos in society at large.

And it's not necessarily making us any safer.

If you look at the prisoner populations per 100,000 people, which is a standard metric across various countries, the rate per 100,000 people has doubled, you know, over the course of the 20th, 21st centuries.

And again, no one necessarily says we're more safe.

And the example looming in the distance is the US, which locks up vast numbers of people for very long periods of time.

And again, it's got a quite high crime rate.

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