England and Wales free about 700 prisoners on the first morning of the Sentencing Act scheme

About 700 prisoners walked out of jails in England and Wales on Thursday morning under a permanent early-release scheme that Parliament has now brought into force. The Ministry of Justice expects about 2,550 releases by the end of the year and about 4,500 by next summer. The figure was cut from around 6,000 after Prime Minister Andy Burnham reviewed the terms and took manslaughter, grooming offences, and causing or allowing the death of a child off the list.

The scheme covers a slice of roughly 70,000 offenders. People who were due to serve half their term in custody and half on licence will now leave at the one-third point, if they qualify. People who were due to serve two-thirds will leave at half. The sentence length does not change. The date they start the community part of it does. About 18,000 inmates are excluded outright: those convicted of murder, manslaughter, a sexual or grooming offence, or a driving offence that caused a death. Their dates stay as they were.

The rollout is staged, which is the detail that decides who actually left on Thursday. The first eligible group is people jailed for up to 19 months. From November the net widens to sentences of up to three years and two months. By next June, fixed-term prisoners serving more than 12 years, the group that expected to stay inside for two-thirds of the term, become eligible to leave at the halfway mark. Thursday was the first of 10 scheduled release days. The last is in June 2027. Spread evenly across the estate, Thursday's 700 would be about six people per prison. They will not have been spread evenly.

Capacity is the reason ministers gave. Ministry of Justice figures for Monday put the prison population at 87,499, which is 98.2 percent of available space. A system at that level has almost no room for a weekend of arrests. The Conservative early-release programme that ran from October 2023 to September 2024 freed more than 10,000 people. This scheme is smaller, permanent, and written into the Sentencing Act rather than run as an emergency instruction. It is also the second time in three years that a government has moved the custody fraction to keep the estate from filling.

The exclusions are where the politics landed. A first draft that pointed at about 6,000 releases included categories Burnham then removed. Manslaughter and child-death offences staying inside is the change that cut the total toward 4,500. Domestic-abuse campaigners have still objected to the one-third point for shorter sentences, because a large share of those cases sit in the under-19-month band that left on Thursday. The ministry's answer is the exclusion list and the licence. A person released at one-third is still under sentence. Recall remains available if the licence is broken.

Recall is the number to watch, and it is not in Thursday's release sheet. Earlier emergency schemes saw a share of those freed returned within months for breaking licence conditions. If that pattern repeats, part of the 700 comes back into a system that was at 98.2 percent before they left. The capacity gain is then smaller than the headline, and it arrives before the November wave, which is the larger one.

Thursday's known facts are the 700, the 4,500 by next summer, the cut from 6,000, the 18,000 excluded, and a population of 87,499. The next release day is in November, and it covers a longer sentence band.