PRISONERS will still be freed early under a Labour government, Sir Keir Starmer admitted yesterday.
The prime minister conceded controversial rules letting lags out up to 70 days before their release date would stay.
And he refused to distance himself from his prisons minister’s claim that two in three inmates shouldn’t even be in jail.
In his first press conference inside No.10, the PM slammed the “broken” prison system, declaring: “We’ve got too many prisoners, not enough prisons.
“We will fix that, but we can’t fix it overnight.
“And therefore it is impossible to simply say we will stop the early release of prisoners and you wouldn’t believe me if I did say it.”
He claimed he had been forced to keep releasing crooks early because of the Tories’ “monumental failure” to build more jail cells.
Sir Keir blasted: “We don’t have the prisons we need and I can’t build a prison in 24 hours.”
Labour previously said they would designate jails as sites of national importance, allowing the government to set planning rules instead of pen-pushing council mandarins.
The PM also defended his appointment of Timpson’s cobblers boss James Timpson as prisons minister – claiming it was a sign of “change and delivery”.
Mr Timpson, who has hired hundreds of ex-cons to run his stores, previously branded Britain as being “addicted to sentencing and punishment.”
Speaking on a Channel 4 news podcast last year, the businessman said of lags: “A third of them should definitely be there.
“There’s another third in the middle, which probably shouldn’t be there, but they need some other kind of state support.
“A lot of them have massive mental health issues, they’ve been in prison all their lives.
“And then there’s another third and there’s a large proportion of women who shouldn’t.”
The Labour-backer, whose brother Edward stepped down as a Tory MP at the election, continued: “Prison is a disaster for them because it’s just putting them back in the offending cycle.”
Last night a surviving Tory MP said the comment showed Labour would be soft on crime and punishments in power.
Ex-minister Alec Shelbrooke fumed: “Let’s hope Sir Keir’s first act to solve the prison population problem is not to release two-thirds of them.
“Because that would be a long way from Tony Blair’s mantra of ‘tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime’.
“As a government minister now, James Timpson’s going to have to realise he’s in the real world.
“If he thinks that the solution to solve the prison overcrowding problem is to release two thirds of prisoners, it shows a fundamental misunderstanding of law and justice.”
Pressed on whether he backed his minister’s stance, Sir Keir insisted: “The Prisons Minister has huge experience and has invested a huge amount over many years in relation to prisons.
“We need to get away from the fact that for so many people who come out of prison, they’re back in prison relatively quickly afterwards.
“That is a massive problem that we have in this country.”
And the PM, once responsible for securing prison terms for crooks as the nation’s top prosecutor, added: “I’ve sat in the back of I don’t know how many criminal courts and watched people process through the system into prison.
“And I’ve often reflected that many of them could have been taken out of that system earlier if they’d had support.
“If you can pull people out before they get on the escalator that ends up in imprisonment, that means that they have more productive lives.”
The PM said intervening early to stop surging knife crime would be a “top priority”.
He went on: “Otherwise you and I will all sit at the back of courts watching the same people being processed over and over again.”
The Ministry of Justice started the early release scheme last October to combat prison overcrowding.
Originally prisoners were let out 18 days before their release dates.
But early releases were increased to 60 days before release in March and again to 70 days in May.
Figures released on Friday showed more than 98 per cent of cells were occupied with only 1,400 prison spaces available across the country.
