The MP for Harborough, Oadby and Wigston has published an article, available here, looking at alternatives to the new Government's plan to release prisoners after serving only 40%-43% of their sentence.
The new Prime Minister, Kier Starmer, and his Prisons Minister, James Timpson, both believe that more people are being put in prison than ought to be. Neil O'Brien does not agree, saying: "Prison works. Where there are natural experiments you can see this very clearly. For example, Italy has periodically done mass pardons to clear out its jails, and the result was always higher crime.
"Indeed, the UK is arguably such a natural experiment: Crime rose inexorably from the 1950s to 1995 and the risk of imprisonment for criminals fell. Then Michael Howard declared that prison worked, and started to run up the prison population. His Labour successors followed, and crime fell.
"If we don't have room left in our prisons, the short-term solution is not to release prisoners that should be there. What we need to do is to remove foreign nationals from our prisons, give magistrates stronger sentencing powers, and roll out emergency prison places.
"In the longer term, the right thing to do in order to cut crime and keep people safe is to imprison prolific offenders for longer. I am calling on the Government to do more to find the money for more places. We must change this."
