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Shabana Mahmood will limit how long hundreds of repeat offenders can be returned to prison for amid Whitehall predictions that jails will be full again in November.
The justice secretary also announced a £4.7bn plan to build three new prisons starting this year, part of a “record expansion” as the government attempts to get to grips with the criminal justice system.
Senior Tories accused Mahmood of failing to punish criminals, sarcastically saying repeat offenders would be “quaking in their boots”.
In an alarming message delivered at a Downing Street press conference, Mahmood warned that prisons were 99% full, adding: “If we don’t do anything now, we risk a total breakdown in law and order.”
There would be a shake-up of “prison recall” system to allow some prisoners to be returned to prison for only a fixed 28-day period if they breached their licence conditions, she said.
“It is shameful that this country in 2025 finds itself in this cycle of crisis. It is shameful that for so long, the last Conservative government failed to reckon with the reality of a rising prison population,” she said.
The new recall measures are expected to free up about 1,400 places, Mahmood indicated. They will apply to offenders who were sentenced to between one and four years and were let out on licence but commit another offence.
Asked how many people would be released as a result of the fixed-term measures, Mahmood said: “We believe that that number will allow us to get from November into spring of next year … we are on track to hit zero capacity within our prison estate by November, and this measure will tide us over until any changes from the sentencing review start to hit the system.”
A standard recall currently results in offenders being taken back to prison for the remainder of their sentence, but this can be for shorter fixed terms in some circumstances.
The latest measures are aimed at dealing with the scale of the continuing crisis in prisons, as the latest weekly prison population in England and Wales stands at 88,087.
This is 434 below the last peak in the prison population of 88,521 inmates on 6 September, recorded just before the government began freeing thousands of prisoners early as part of efforts to curb jail overcrowding.
The three prisons will be built near existing prisons, Mahmood said including “breaking ground” on a site near HMP Gartree in Leicestershire “later this year”.
Officials said the others would be near HMP Garth near Leyland, Lancashire, and HMP Grendon in the village of Grendon Underwood, Buckinghamshire.
She warned that despite “record prison expansion”, England and Wales would still be more than 9,000 prison places short by 2028.
The recall population in prisons has “more than doubled” in seven years, she said, as she set out the latest measure to ease prison capacity.
Some will be excluded from the scheme, “including any offender who has been recalled for committing a serious further offence”, said Mahmood.
Amy Rees, the MoJ’s interim permanent secretary, said the government would “run out of prison places in just five months’ time”, if further measures were not taken.
“On our current trajectory, the prison population rises by 3,000, and now we expect to hit zero capacity, to entirely run out of prison places for adult men, in November of this year,” she said.
The announcement came before a package of prison overcrowding measures to be recommended next week by an independent sentencing review.
Led by the former Tory justice secretary David Gauke, it will say that prisoners will be able to earn their freedom after serving a third of their sentences under new minimum and maximum sentence plans.
Offenders in England and Wales will be able to earn early release if they complete work, training or education assignments and demonstrate good behaviour.
Gauke is expected to support the further rollout of specialist courts to break addictions of prolific offenders. Intensive supervision courts have been set up for female offenders in three pilots across England and Wales.
Changes from a sentencing bill would be expected to start having an effect in April next year, Mahmood said.
“We will legislate at pace. And as I described earlier, currently we’re on track to come down to zero capacity in November of this year,” she said.
“That’s why I’ve announced the measures on fixed-term recall today, we would anticipate that any changes from a sentencing bill could start having an impact on April of next year, so that’s the timeline that we are working to.
“We’re moving very, very quickly, but it’s because we want to make sure we never have to do emergency releases again.”
Posting on X, the shadow justice secretary, Robert Jenrick, said: “Labour are so obsessed with working from home, they want to roll it out to prisoners too. Criminals will be quaking in their boots.”
