23 July 2026 - 10:00am
Two of the three men convicted of the 2019 killing of PC Andrew Harper may be released halfway through their sentences. The Ministry of Justice has confirmed as much, expressing sympathy for Harper’s widow and promising to build prisons “at the fastest rate since the Victorian era”. But the inconvenient truth is this: whether Jessie Cole and Albert Bowers walk free at the midpoint of a 13-year term has less to do with their crime, and more to do with how many prison cells England currently has available.
This is the story beneath the headlines. In 2024, England and Wales housed 87,300 people behind bars — the highest total recorded since measurements began in 1900. By this April, prison numbers stood at 85,700, with capacity around 89,800. In summer 2024, the male estate nearly ran out of space entirely.
That crisis produced SDS40, an emergency scheme introduced in September 2024 that cut the automatic release point for most sentences from 50% to 40%. In the latest 12-month period (January to December 2025), there were 43,886 SDS40 releases, with 11,177 of those coming in the latest quarter (October to December 2025). SDS40 has now been revoked and superseded by the “earned progression model” of the Sentencing Act 2026, which restructures standard determinate sentences into a three-stage system of custody, active supervision, and licence.
Cole and Bowers aren’t in that specific cohort: violent offences of this length sit outside SDS40, so their release remains at the older, less drastic 50%. But even that figure is a policy choice, not an inevitability. Automatic release at the halfway point of standard determinate sentences was written into law in 2003 and has applied since 2005 — a fixed rule, regardless of what the judge, Attorney General or Court of Appeal say. In 2020, then-Attorney General Suella Braverman argued that the sentences of Cole and Bowers were unduly lenient, while the Court of Appeal described them as lenient but not legally “unduly lenient” enough to justify increasing them.
In reality, average custodial sentences for manslaughter have increased substantially over the past two decades. As courts have responded to rising minimum terms for murder, judges have been sentencing manslaughter more severely. Yet a 13-year sentence, when an automatic halfway release is factored in, means that Cole and Bowers will be home in time for Christmas — albeit technically serving the other half of their sentences on licence. Prison sentencing in England and Wales is essentially the criminal justice equivalent of a Dutch auction: a bargain negotiated by statute, not by the courts, and certainly not by public decree.
There is an irony here. Harper’s Law, named for Lissie Harper’s campaign following her husband’s death, was meant to guarantee mandatory life sentences — unless under exceptional circumstances — for those convicted of manslaughter against emergency workers. But it could not apply retroactively to this case: the law, passed in 2022, came too late for a crime committed three years earlier. The machinery of automatic release operated anyway, further softening a sentence already considered too short by campaigners and the Attorney General’s office.
This is less an argument for harsher sentences than an argument that the public has been sold a fiction about what a sentence means — a fiction that unravels under scrutiny. While the prison system it inherited was said to be “days from collapse”, the Government finds itself balancing the realpolitik of reforming HMPS against a growing sense, as the Harper case demonstrates, that public safety is being rationed for cell space.
Earlier this week, Defence Secretary Wes Streeting joked on camera that his counterpart at the MoJ, Alex Norris, “wants to let them all out” — a reference to the Government’s early release strategy. We now have a senior Cabinet minister saying the quiet part out loud: the system has become optimised for capacity, not justice.
