The Sentencing Act 2026 is now in force. It is being sold by Labour ministers as a sensible response to prison overcrowding. Read the small print and you find something rather different: a deliberate, ideological shift away from punishment, away from public protection, and towards the comfortable assumptions of the legal establishment.
The result? Offenders walking out of prison earlier. Short sentences effectively abolished by default. Judges nudged into community orders for crimes that the public — rightly — expects to result in a custodial sentence.
What the Act Actually Does
The headline change is the move to a presumption of early release at a much earlier point in many sentences. Standard determinate-sentence prisoners can now be considered for release after serving less than half their term in some cases. There is also a new presumption against short custodial sentences — meaning judges are now expected to find an alternative to prison for most offences carrying under twelve months.
That covers a huge swathe of crime: low-level burglary, repeated shop theft, assaults that don’t cause grievous harm, possession offences, breach of restraining orders. The kind of crimes that destroy quality of life on Britain’s high streets and in residential neighbourhoods. The kind of crimes that are increasingly committed by repeat offenders who already know there are no real consequences.
Prison Doesn’t Work? Tell That to the Victims
The argument from the Justice Secretary is that “short prison sentences don’t reduce reoffending.” This is the favourite mantra of the criminal justice softening lobby. It is also misleading. Short prison sentences don’t reduce reoffending compared to longer ones. They very much do reduce reoffending compared to no sentence at all — for the simple reason that someone in a prison cell isn’t out committing crimes against your neighbours.
The deeper problem is that Labour, the Civil Service, and the senior judiciary increasingly view the criminal justice system as a means of managing offenders rather than protecting the public. Prison is treated as a regrettable cost. Victims are treated as an inconvenience to be processed, then forgotten.
Build More Prisons
Britain has a prison overcrowding problem because we lock up too few people, not too many. We have around 88,000 prisoners on a population of 67 million. The United States has more than ten times that rate. Whatever your view of US incarceration, you cannot seriously argue that Britain’s problem is excessive imprisonment when knife crime is rising, shoplifting is endemic, and women across the country are being told to expect that their attackers will not see the inside of a cell.
The answer to overcrowded prisons is not to release the inmates. It is to build more prisons.
What Reform UK Would Do
Reform UK would scrap the Sentencing Act’s presumption against short custodial sentences. We would introduce minimum sentencing guidelines for repeat offences — a third strike on knife possession should mean prison, no exceptions. We would commit to building new prison capacity, including reactivating closed military bases as additional secure accommodation where suitable.
And we would restore the principle that the criminal justice system exists primarily to punish wrongdoing and protect the public — not to manage offenders out of the back door because the Ministry of Justice can’t balance its own books.