Parsing the signals from a new Labour government in July, advocates of prison reform felt a trickle of not exactly optimism, given their decades of disappointments, but hope. Labour's campaign manifesto, while resounding with the obligatory tough-on-crime thunder, acknowledged the inhumane overcrowding in UK prisons and the failure to equip prisoners for a safe return to society.
Describing the prison system as “dangerously close to total collapse”, the new government recruited a former Tory justice secretary, David Gauke, to head an independent review of increasingly punitive sentencing under the previous several governments. And within hours of becoming prime minister Keir Starmer selected as minister of prisons and probation James Timpson, a businessman known for hiring hundreds of former convicts, and for declaring that “many people who are in prison shouldn’t be there”. Starmer’s debut, especially the Timpson appointment, received cautious praise from mainstream charities such as the Howard League for Penal Reform and the Prison Reform Trust.
The right wing also took note. In the Telegraph, Rory Geoghegan, founder of the Public Safety Foundation, suggested the new prisons minister’s faith in “endless second chances” made him “the most dangerous man in Britain”. Could it be that serious change is afoot?
All this attention on the UK prison crisis reminded me of a prison reform groundswell that attracted bipartisan support in the US in the 1990s. At that time, liberals found unexpected common ground with libertarians mistrustful of big government, evangelical Christians who believe in redemption and fiscal conservatives appalled by the high cost of mass incarceration.
In the 2016 presidential election several right-wing candidates embraced “Right on Crime”, a campaign to promote “successful, conservative solutions” to the excesses and failures of the criminal justice system. That reformist consensus began to lose momentum as Republicans, including Donald Trump, weaponised public anxiety about crime.
A few years ago I wrote a short primer on American prisons, posing the question: What’s Prison For? Incarceration is intended to serve several purposes. It satisfies society’s demand for punishment, reinforcing the principle that rules come with consequences. It incapacitates some dangerous people for a time, limiting their pool of potential victims to prison staff and fellow inmates. And it serves as a deterrent, at least for would-be offenders who calculate the risk of a jail sentence before committing a crime.
And—a purpose too often neglected—a prison sentence also offers an opportunity to prepare offenders to be restored to the community as citizens and neighbours. The overwhelming majority of imprisoned felons are ultimately released—600,000 a year in the US, about 70,000 in the UK. Too many of them emerge from prisons alienated, unskilled and estranged from their families. Former inmates often have untreated drug dependencies. They may have no idea how to get a driver’s licence or open a bank account, let alone find housing and a job. As Labour’s 2024 campaign manifesto put it: “Far from being places where offenders are punished and rehabilitated, prisons are a breeding ground for more crime. Prison leavers are more likely to reoffend if they do not have the tools to move away from crime, if they have nowhere to live and if they do not have a job on release.”
The best test of whether a penal system is doing its job is what happens after prison. The UK, like the US, largely fails that test. A quarter of the offenders released in the UK reoffend within a year.
The probation staff that supervises the resettlement of released prisoners is even more threadbare than the prison staff. Over-stressed prisons hand on their cases to over-stressed probation officers, whose caseloads commonly run to 60 or more clients.
For every person confined in a UK prison, another three are on probation, and measures that relieve pressure on prisons increase pressure on the probation service. In the early days of the Labour government, when prisons were at capacity following mass arrests of anti-Muslim and anti-migrant rioters, the government decreed that inmates convicted of non-violent crimes could be considered for release after serving 40 per cent of their sentences rather than the usual 50 per cent.
The measure meant early release for more than 5,000 offenders. What went largely unremarked is that this meant that all of these people were now on probation. Many of them can expect to end up back inside, either arrested for new crimes or caught violating the protocols of supervised release by missing an appointment or failing a drug test. A staggering 80 per cent of offenders are reoffenders, and the transgressions are not all petty. The Inspectorate of Probation, the independent monitor of this transitional service, reported that 770 probationers in England and Wales were charged with serious violent or sexual offences in the past year, an increase of a third over the previous year.
The probation system originated as a volunteer service of churches and charities whose culture was more akin to social workers than enforcers. The role was commonly described as to “advise, assist and befriend” released inmates. A 1907 law established probation staff as officers of the court, and over the decades the emphasis shifted from advising and befriending to minimising risk to the wider population. The service was traumatised by austerity budgets and by a partial privatisation scheme under David Cameron that proved a fiasco. Probation has still not fully recovered.
Martin Jones, the chief inspector of probation for England and Wales, told me in December that courts would ideally send many more offenders to noncustodial alternatives. Options include community sentences or electronically monitored house arrest, which also have the virtue of being much cheaper than prison.
“But judges see chaos in the probation service and they don’t have the confidence to put offenders into the community,” Jones said.
One man who understands the reformative potential of probation is James Timpson, the retail mogul Starmer selected as minister of prisons, probation and reducing reoffending. (“Reducing reoffending” is Timpson’s amendment to the job title, intended to highlight the anti-crime rationale for reforms that critics on the right tend to portray as weakness or prisoner pampering).
Timpson was raised with a sense of noblesse oblige, in what he has described as an atmosphere of kindness mixed with chaos. His mother took in short-term foster children, more than 90 over the course of 30 years; many were children of mothers doing time in prison.
Timpson inherited a family-owned retail empire that offers services including shoe repair, dry cleaning, key cutting and photo processing in more than 2,000 shops across the country. He employs more than 600 formerly incarcerated men and women in his workforce of 5,600. He also underwrites training academies in scores of UK prisons, where motivated inmates learn occupational skills. He spearheaded the creation of regional employment advisory boards, which are now being expanded to help frontline probation staff connect with local labour markets.
When I interviewed Timpson in 2023 for an article comparing UK and US prisons, he described the probation services as “completely underfunded and risk-averse”, a consequence of public fear and the politicians who pander to it. “We’ve got a political movement that is addicted to punishment but is not addicted to funding those who are punished,” he told me. (Timpson declined to be interviewed for this article.)
Governments of both parties have learned to treat criminal justice reform as a potential career-ender. The centrepiece of Labour’s prison strategy is building four new prisons. “Fundamentally a lot of the public don’t believe in rehabilitation,” says Ian Lawrence, general secretary of Napo, the trade union for probation officers, which supports much of Timpson’s agenda. “They just want the prisoner off the streets.”
Before his appointment as minister Timpson was the chairman of the Prison Reform Trust, and his brother was a Conservative MP, but Timpson had shunned a role in politics. In 2022, he told Andy Coulson’s podcast Crisis? What Crisis?: “I don’t like the idea of having to play to someone else’s tune and say things I don’t necessarily believe in.” This idealism reminds me of the novice senator played by James Stewart in Frank Capra’s 1939 satire, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. Now, thanks to Starmer, Timpson has a seat in the House of Lords and one of the more frustrating jobs in politics. (He is the 13th person to hold the prisons portfolio in a decade.) He has said he sees prison reform as a project that will take years, and he evinces no ambition to follow his predecessors into a career in government.
“James has a plan that covers far more bases than previous ministers have wanted to, and is genuinely based on the expectation that he’ll be there for a long time and won’t do anything else in government afterwards,” says one reform advocate who has worked closely with Timpson. “He also has a very good memory, so officials will find they’re much more likely to be held to account, and expected to do stuff, not just talk about doing it.”
Even some reform advocates who admire Timpson question whether one man–particularly a political neophyte–can convince the government to invest serious capital (including its diminishing supply of political capital) in reintegrating offenders into society. In July John Podmore, a former prison governor and inspector who is an acute critic of the penal system, welcomed Timpson to his new assignment with a warning (in this magazine) that the ministry was “a poisoned chalice”.
“Lord Timpson enters a new world,” Podmore wrote. “He begins with many friends but will need to disappoint a good few while making new enemies. He will need to be bold, imaginative and pragmatic, and acquire the hide of a rhino.”
In his first months Timpson has won over many probation workers and prison reform advocates who wondered at first if his appointment was a PR stunt. He has spent more time than previous prison ministers visiting prisons and probation officers, and has made a point of being accessible to victims of crime to underscore that he sees his first obligation as public safety.
Timpson has an important ally in the chairman of the independent sentencing review. Gauke, who was justice secretary under Theresa May, favours more community sentences and open prisons where residents are allowed to leave custody during the day for jobs or schooling. Both Timpson and Gauke advocate sharply reducing the number of short sentences—a year or less—which uproot offenders from their communities while leaving too little time for rehabilitation. In an introductory chapter that Gauke published in February, the sentencing review blamed the calamitous overcrowding of prisons largely on politicians posing as tough on crime, and debunked the popular myth that longer sentences serve as a significant deterrent.
“A significant share of resource has been invested in the prison service, with an underinvestment in probation and alternatives that provide sufficient rehabilitation and can break the cycle of reoffending,” the review concluded. It read like an overture to a Timpson agenda.
So far, Timpson appears to also have the support of his immediate boss, the justice secretary Shabana Mahmood. In February she pledged to recruit 1,300 new probation officers by March 2026—saying the current force of about 16,000 is spread far too thin and is losing many of its most experienced members.
Timpson may be new to politics, but with his sunny grin, disarming penchant for owlish eyeglasses and approachable manner, he is a charismatic salesman—and enough of a realist to temper expectations. In an interview with the Sunday Times in early January, Timpson stood by his belief that up to two-thirds of the present prison population should not be in jail, though he conceded that such a radical cut is not currently a plausible target. He also backed away from a proposal that the UK should allow prisoners to be considered for parole after serving a quarter of their sentences. “I’m in government now… I don’t remember what I said a long time ago,” he told the Times.
And while there is a desperate need to train and retain probation officers, Timpson will be competing for funding with demands to upgrade the health service, increase military spending and, not incidentally, build more jail cells.
“With the Labour government in its infancy, there’s a real opportunity to make radical decisions,” Ian Lawrence tells me.
And if Timpson and his allies can’t fundamentally change the system, they may at least change its direction. “There will be uproar,” Lawrence says. “There will be people jumping up and down. But what it would do is provide a proper public debate for the first time in generations about what we should be doing about rehabilitation.”
