What the HELL is Starmer thinking!? - It's not soft justice - it's NO justice at all - Carole Malone

But what I DO care about – and I realise its radical – are the victims of these criminals, who even now maybe totally unaware that the monsters who shattered their lives are about to be spewed back onto the streets to hurt more people, shatter more lives.

Or a worse scenario is that they DO know they’re being let out and are living in terror of it.

What The Hell is Starmer thinking of? This isn’t soft justice. It’s no damn justice at all. And releasing 5,000 criminals – 1,700 of them today - is actually creating a crime wave that doesn’t currently exist.

Nothing on this earth can justify this Government ,or any other, freeing criminals for the ludicrous reason they’ve got nowhere to put them. Is it really beyond the wit of ministers and the civil service to find somewhere to put them? They seem to be able to find places to detain the hundreds of illegal immigrants who flood into the UK every month so why can’t they find somewhere secure for criminals who are a threat to all of us?

And the release of these prisoners isn’t just a danger to the British people. It’s a danger to our justice system itself . Because what this lunatic release scheme shouts loud and clear is that justice doesn’t matter a tuppenny damn any more. There IS no justice - at least not for the victims of crime.

There must be prisoners today who are laughing their socks off knowing they haven’t been remotely punished for whatever it is they’ve done. In fact anyone looking at the crowds gathering outside Wandsworth prison you could be forgiven for thinking its carnival time with lags’ relatives laughing, shouting and cheering the fact these hardened criminals are going to be running into their arms having essentially been “ let off”.

And that’s the message this Labour government is peddling - steal what you like, hurt who you like, rape who you like and you’ll serve a piddling sentence before being let out to do it all again. What larks eh?

Well actually No. This demented policy is a recipe for disaster - and even more crime,

Yes, there’s the “ soft on crime” mob who don’t believe anyone should be sent to prison for anything. They naively believe every criminal has a good heart - even if they have stabbed someone 60 times - and shouldn’t be incarcerated.

Our new prisons minister, James Timpson, has actually said he doesn’t think most people who are in prison should be there. This is the bloke who runs the Timpson shoe repair and key cutting group. He hasn’t been elected by the British people yet we’re supposed to trust what he says about violent criminals. Seriously?

Naïve do- gooders like Timpson are exploited by criminals who see them as a gullible idiots who actually assist them in their criminal endeavours.

God forbid no-one Timpson loves ever gets raped – or worse. God forbid his home ever gets ransacked and he’s tied to a chair and beaten while they do it. See if he still believes people who do that should get community service with a bit of light street sweeping thrown in.

One former prison inmate, Chris Atkins, who served five years for tax fraud, said this week that the majority of people in prison are desperate to get out – so they can commit more crimes!

He says he used to sit and listen to men planning what crimes they were going to commit when they got out. He says some of London’s biggest drug dealers would be chatting over a cup of tea while working out details of their next shipment.

And this Government is actually facilitating those drug deals and worse …..

What’s also dangerous here is that these prisoners are being thrown back onto the streets without there having been any proper risk assessment of what they might do or who they might hurt. Leaked internal documents say checks will be done on them AFTER they’ve been discharged - that’s presuming , of course, they can find them and that they cooperate. Which they probably won’t.

It feels like this whole ill-thought out scheme has been designed to encourage even more crime.

We’ve got 88,500 men and women currently residing in archaic jails and the answer isn’t just to throw them back onto the streets it’s to build new 21st century jails where criminals can be punished first and rehabilitated afterwards if they’re deemed to be suitable for that.

Yes, I get that prisoners need to know that there could be a decent, fulfilling life for them outside prison if they decide they want to go straight.

But there are too many who don’t and who just want to get out of jail so they can carry on where they left off.

And that’s why it’s an entirely unacceptable risk to the public to allow these criminals back onto the streets.

Keir Starmer lied to us when he said Labour was the party of law and order. He put law and order at the heart of his election campaign but he omitted to mention he’d be freeing 5,000 prisoners who’d served just 40% of their sentence. If he’d told us that we wouldn’t have voted for him.

The only solution is to build brand new prisons - and fast! If we can build tens of thousands of new houses - which Starmer has vowed to do - then it can build ten new prisons.

In fact , as it’s the Government’s job to protect its people, it has an absolute duty to!