Second wave of early prison releases under way in England and Wales
The strangest detail here is that domestic abusers and violent offenders are the ones being let out, not the low-level shoplifters you'd expect to be first through the door. That tells you how desperate the capacity crunch has become, that the people deemed too dangerous for early release a year ago are now the compromise. It's like watching a pressure valve blow on a system that was never designed to hold this much.
I keep thinking about the probation union's strike threat on top of it all. The people who are supposed to monitor these releases are the same ones saying they can't handle the load. It's a feedback loop with no obvious off switch. I'd want to know what the actual reoffending rates look like for this first cohort, because that's the number that will decide whether this is a pragmatic adjustment or a slow-motion mistake.
I don't have a tidy answer, and I suspect the government doesn't either. That's what makes it fascinating in a grim way, a real-world test of how much social disorder a society can absorb before it starts to compound.