England and Wales to Free 2,000 Prisoners Early as Prisons Fill Up
About 2,000 offenders, including domestic abusers and violent offenders, are due to be freed early over the next month in England and Wales to ease prison overcrowding, starting 1 October 2026.
Several hundred are expected to leave on 1 October in the first phase, with releases across dozens of prisons The Guardian. The October group is the first part of a larger programme. A further 3,000 prisoners are due to be freed in stages over the next year. The combined total of about 5,000 is down from an earlier plan for 6,000 after Prime Minister Andy Burnham intervened.
The legal basis is the 2026 Sentencing Act. It allows ministers to lower the release point for certain fixed-term sentences, meaning sentences with a set end date, from 40% to one-third of the sentence. The October releases are the first large-scale use of that power.
Ministers have set clear exclusions. Offenders jailed in child grooming gang cases or convicted of indecent assault are excluded. Those convicted of manslaughter are also excluded, so the killers of police officer Andrew Harper, who died in 2019, are not eligible.
Release mechanism and exclusions
The mechanism changes time served in custody, not the length of the sentence. Eligible prisoners serving determinate sentences, a legal term for fixed-term sentences, become eligible for release after one-third rather than 40%. The exclusions keep longer custody for certain sexual and homicide cases. Maximum hostel stays for serious offenders such as freed rapists and murderers had previously been reduced from 12 to eight weeks, which speeds turnover in approved premises, the supervised hostels for ex-offenders.
Probation and tagging capacity
Support in the community is already tight. A probation source said hostel places for ex-offenders are full and some prisoners will be released with no fixed address. Napo, the probation officers union, has raised the accommodation shortage with prison bosses. Residents of probation hostels in England and Wales typically stay for about eight to 12 weeks, and can be recalled to prison if they refuse drug and alcohol tests.
The next pressure point is 13 October 2026, when a second group of prisoners is due for release. Finding beds is expected to become critical then. Hostels are full. Staffing is short.
Napo national chair Ben Cockburn said HM Prison Service was in absolute denial about the Probation Service, citing large staff shortages, unsustainable workloads and failing electronic monitoring. The union says release dates can be set by law, but supervision capacity cannot.
The Ministry of Justice says it is launching the biggest ever expansion of electronic monitoring, with a new presumption that offenders will be tagged when they leave prison. The government has previously put that expansion at up to 22,000 more offenders and defendants tagged each year, backed by £100 million in extra funding UK Government.
Delivery is lagging. A joint report by probation and police watchdogs found only 55% of GPS and radio frequency tags were fitted on time, and 60% for alcohol monitoring tags, with some people waiting up to five months for a tag. Ministers describe tagging as the main safeguard for earlier release.
Precedent
The current plan follows the early release programme launched by Keir Starmer's government in September 2024, months after the general election. That scheme, known as SDS40, planned to release up to 2,000 prisoners in the second week of September. It was later extended indefinitely. A police association chief said criminals were potentially being freed without proper rehabilitation plans in connection with the early release of 1,700 prisoners.
The government said in January 2026 that jails would have fully run out of space by June if it had not acted to avert a summer prison disaster UK Government. Prison governors have said prisoners freed under the last early release scheme are returning to jail at a rapid rate BBC.
The broader context here is a system managing crowding by adjusting release points rather than adding prison places. For those running the system, the numbers to watch are recall rates, time-to-tag, and hostel occupancy after 13 October. If supervision and housing do not keep pace with releases, the cycle seen after 2024 could repeat: early release to relieve prisons, followed by breach, recall and return to custody.
What this means for criminal justice administration is that the cut from 6,000 to about 5,000 shows political care around offence mix and risk. Domestic abusers and violent offenders are included, while grooming, indecent assault and manslaughter cases are excluded. Enforcement will depend less on the statute and more on probation caseloads, tagging contractors and local housing supply.
