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Debate between Shabana Mahmood and Lindsay Hoyle(1 month ago)
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Shabana Mahmood (Birmingham, Ladywood) (Lab)
This Conservative Government promised 20,000 prison places by 2025, but so far they have only delivered under 6,000. The Justice Secretary is letting violent offenders out up to two months early because, as we found out from press briefings about dire warnings to No. 10, he has literally nowhere to put them. Instead of focusing on what happened 14 years ago under the last Labour Government, will he level with the public about the true scale of the prisons capacity crisis that is unfolding on his watch?
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Debate between Shabana Mahmood and Lindsay Hoyle(2 months, 1 week ago)
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Shabana Mahmood (Birmingham, Ladywood) (Lab)
Prisoners are spending up to 23 hours a day locked up in their cells as a direct result of overcrowding and the prisons capacity crisis caused by this Government. However, I hear congratulations are in order following an announcement last month, not on the Government actually delivering any of the new prisons they have promised or on even getting spades in the ground, but on their submitting yet another planning application for the Leicestershire prison that the Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities has already ruled on once. Is not about time that the Minister renamed the new prisons programme the no prisons programme?
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Debate between Shabana Mahmood and Lindsay Hoyle(3 months, 3 weeks ago)
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Shabana Mahmood (Birmingham, Ladywood) (Lab)
Many, many more offenders will be serving their sentences in the community as a result of the measures in the upcoming Sentencing Bill. We all know that the Government have had to rush these measures out to deal with the prisons capacity crisis that they have created, but it is essential to recognise that these measures will rely heavily on a functioning probation service. With only one of the 33 probation delivery units inspected being rated as “good”, and all others being rated as “requiring improvement” or “inadequate,” what additional resources have been put in place to ensure that potentially dangerous criminals are being properly monitored?
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Debate between Shabana Mahmood and Lindsay Hoyle(7 months, 3 weeks ago)
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Shabana Mahmood (Birmingham, Ladywood) (Lab)
I thank the Minister for the update about Daniel Khalife, but the fact remains that HMP Wandsworth has been a known problem for the best part of a decade, with a litany of failures including overcrowding, staffing and security issues. Khalife is not even the first escape from Wandsworth; there was an incident in 2019, which the chief inspector of prisons said was the result of a “serious security breach”. Why, after so many warnings about Wandsworth, have the Government failed to act?