Criminal Justice workers Union

01/09/2026

National President Aaron Stowe speaking on GB News 01/09/2026 with Martin Daubney.

31/08/2026

4,500 MORE RELEASES.

And apparently the criminal justice system will simply… cope.

The Government has now published its first estimated release figures for the new Progression Model under the Sentencing Act 2026.

From October, the new system begins.

Across ten implementation tranches running through to June 2027, the Ministry of Justice estimates that around 4,500 additional prisoners will be released on the first day of those tranches alone.

Let us make that absolutely clear.

4,500 additional first-day releases.

That is not the total number who will ultimately be affected by the policy.

It is not 4,500 and finished.

Once each tranche is implemented, eligible prisoners will continue to be released under the new arrangements as part of the normal operation of the system.

So, before somebody reaches for the familiar Government phrase about “carefully managed releases”, perhaps those actually working within criminal justice might be permitted to ask a few rather inconvenient questions.

Who exactly is going to manage them?

Because prisoners do not simply disappear when the gate opens.

They become probation cases.

They require risk assessments.

Licence conditions need monitoring.

Appointments need managing.

Accommodation needs finding.

Victims need protecting and informing.

Breaches need investigating.

Those presenting an increased risk need managing.

And when licence conditions are breached, somebody has to make the professional decision to initiate recall.

That “somebody” is very often an already overstretched criminal justice worker.

And here is where the numbers become rather uncomfortable.

At 31 March 2026, the Probation Service was already supervising 258,332 people.

In just the first three months of 2026 there were 13,193 licence recalls - 31% more than during the same period the previous year.

And while the Government prepares to transfer even greater responsibility into the community, the latest HMPPS workforce figures show the number of qualified probation officers actually fell during the most recent quarter.

So the CJWU has one very simple question:

Where are the people?

Where are the additional experienced Probation Officers?

Where are the PSOs?

Where are the Approved Premises places?

Where is the suitable accommodation?

Where are the additional police resources required when somebody breaches their licence or cannot be located?

Where are the rehabilitation services?

Where is the additional support for victims?

And where is the contingency when the carefully constructed spreadsheet meets the considerably less predictable reality of frontline criminal justice?

Because this is the part that repeatedly seems to get forgotten:

Early release does not eliminate risk.

It transfers responsibility for managing it.

The CJWU accepts that our prisons face a genuine capacity crisis.

Our members work inside that crisis every single day.

They understand it considerably better than most of the people designing policies to solve it.

But you cannot solve a prison staffing and capacity crisis by simply creating a probation staffing and capacity crisis instead.

Prison staff deal with the pressure inside the walls.

Probation staff deal with it when it comes through the gate.

Police deal with it when things go wrong.

Victims and communities potentially live with the consequences.

Moving the pressure from one part of a struggling criminal justice system to another isn’t reform.

It is redistribution of risk.

If Government genuinely believes that more sentences should be managed in the community, then properly resource the community before transferring thousands more cases into it.

Recruit.

Retain.

Train.

Provide accommodation.

Fund rehabilitation.

Support victims.

Resource policing.

And listen to the frontline professionals actually responsible for making these policies work.

Because a prison place might be a number on a Government spreadsheet.

A probation case is a person carrying risk.

And somebody has to manage that risk.

The CJWU will continue asking the question that matters:

Has Government provided the frontline with the people and resources necessary to do this safely?

Because when public protection is involved, “we hope the system can cope” simply isn’t good enough.

Criminal Justice Workers Union (CJWU)
Standing with those who protect the public.

17/08/2026

THE PRISON CRISIS:
EMPTY CELLS, EMPTY LANDINGS AND STAFF RUNNING ON EMPTY

There are empty prison cells across the country.

Not because we have suddenly solved overcrowding.

Not because crime has disappeared.

Not because the prison population has collapsed.

Some of those cells are empty because there simply aren’t enough staff to safely operate them.

Welcome to the modern prison crisis.

A crisis where Government talks about creating prison places while existing capacity can be restricted by the inability to safely staff it.

Where experienced officers leave and those remaining are expected to absorb the pressure.

Where Operational Support Grades, prison officers, managers, healthcare, OMU and countless other staff somehow keep establishments functioning while the system around them becomes increasingly stretched.

And when one prison cannot cope?

Detached duty.

Pack a bag.

Leave your home establishment.

Travel elsewhere.

Help plug another staffing gap created by the same national staffing problems affecting your own jail.

Then return home and discover that the pressures haven’t magically disappeared while you were gone.

And let’s make the CJWU position absolutely clear:

Other unions may be prepared to support detached duty as an answer to the staffing crisis.

THE CJWU DO NOT.

We do not accept that repeatedly moving already overstretched staff around the country represents a credible solution to years of recruitment and retention failures.

We do not accept that staff should be expected to disrupt their home lives, travel significant distances and leave their own establishments short simply because workforce planning has failed elsewhere.

And we certainly do not accept that forced or compelled detached duty should become normalised as a substitute for properly staffing our prisons.

Detached duty may temporarily move the problem.

It does not solve it.

You cannot cure a national staffing shortage by moving the shortage from one prison to another.

This isn’t resilience.

It’s robbing Peter to pay Paul and calling it workforce planning.

Meanwhile, those who remain walk through the gate every day knowing exactly what understaffing means.

It means fewer people available when an alarm sounds.

Less time to speak to the prisoner whose behaviour has suddenly changed.

Less opportunity to notice the warning signs before self-harm.

Less time for meaningful rehabilitation.

More pressure.

More overtime.

More fatigue.

More experienced staff wondering whether they can continue.

And potentially another resignation that makes tomorrow’s staffing position even worse.

Then comes another review.

Another reform.

Another policy.

Another restructuring.

Another initiative.

Another announcement telling frontline staff that somebody, somewhere, has finally discovered how to fix prisons.

Those staff have seen it before.

The wheel isn’t just reinvented anymore.

It’s reinvented, renamed, rebranded, relaunched and rolled straight back over the people keeping the system alive.

Every reform seems to demand more from fewer people.

Every efficiency eventually reaches the frontline.

Every staffing gap becomes somebody else’s additional responsibility.

Every operational failure becomes another process.

And every time the system approaches breaking point, the extraordinary men and women working inside it are expected to stretch just a little further.

Yet there is a limit.

You cannot operate safe prisons without enough prison staff.

You cannot rehabilitate people when staff barely have enough time to complete the essentials.

You cannot maintain decent regimes when wings cannot safely operate.

You cannot keep moving staff around the country indefinitely and pretend the underlying vacancies have disappeared.

And you cannot announce thousands of prison places while ignoring the fundamental question:

WHO IS GOING TO STAFF THEM?

Behind every ministerial announcement about capacity sits a much less comfortable reality.

A prison cell is not a prison place simply because somebody built a door and bolted it to the floor.

It needs officers.

It needs OSGs.

It needs healthcare.

It needs OMU staff.

It needs operational managers.

It needs maintenance, education, administration and support.

It needs experienced people who understand prisons.

And most importantly:

It needs enough of them.

The CJWU sees the people behind the statistics.

The officer finishing another exhausting shift.

The OSG covering another essential duty.

The member of staff being told to travel miles on detached duty because another establishment cannot safely function without reinforcements.

The family whose plans are disrupted because staffing failures elsewhere have suddenly become their problem too.

The experienced colleague quietly deciding that enough is enough.

And those who stay, still unlocking doors, answering alarms, preventing self-harm, managing violence, supporting vulnerable prisoners and protecting the public while carrying pressures that rarely make a Government press release.

They aren’t failing the prison system.

They are the reason it is still functioning.

Stop reinventing the wheel.

Stop moving an inadequate workforce around the country to disguise shortages.

Stop treating detached duty as workforce planning.

Stop treating experienced staff as an endlessly renewable resource.

Recruit.

Retain.

Invest.

Listen to the frontline.

Because eventually there won’t be another establishment to borrow staff from.

There won’t be another shift that can be covered.

There won’t be another colleague willing to sacrifice their wellbeing to fill the gap.

You can build all the cells you like.

Without the people to safely operate them, they’re just expensive empty rooms.

And on detached duty, our position couldn’t be clearer:

Other unions may support it.

THE CJWU DO NOT.

A staffing crisis should be fixed -not redistributed.

CJWU - Criminal Justice Workers Union

Standing with the people who keep the criminal justice system running when policy, politics and promises fail.

14/08/2026

THE PEOPLE BEHIND THE LOCKED DOORS

Behind every locked door is a member of staff.

A person who walks onto a wing knowing that violence, intimidation, self-harm, abuse and death can be part of their working day.

And yet, when we talk about the prison and probation services, we often talk about numbers.

How many prisoners are released.
How many places are available.
How many cases are on a probation officer’s caseload.
How many incidents have occurred.

But where are the figures for the human cost to the staff who deal with it?

Where are the figures showing how many members of staff have been assaulted?

How many have been threatened?

How many have gone home carrying the images, sounds and experiences of the day with them?

How many have struggled to sleep after witnessing a death?

How many have been affected by attending a su***de or serious self-harm incident?

How many have questioned whether they can face walking back through those gates tomorrow?

And perhaps most importantly, where are the figures showing what these staff prevent?

There is no statistic for the death that didn’t happen because a prison officer spotted the warning signs.

No figure for the act of self-harm prevented because a probation practitioner made the extra phone call.

No headline for the prisoner who was talked down from the edge.

No database recording the lives protected because a member of staff noticed something wasn’t right.

No award for the thousands of quiet interventions that happen every single day.

These are the unseen successes of the criminal justice workforce.

Staff don’t simply lock doors.

They intervene.

They listen.

They de-escalate.

They protect.

They comfort families.

They manage people at their most volatile and vulnerable.

They walk into situations others would run from.

And sometimes they witness things that stay with them for the rest of their lives.

Yet when those same staff need help, too often the support simply isn’t there.

Mental health support is limited.
Resources are stretched.
Staff are expected to absorb extraordinary levels of trauma and carry on.

There is an expectation that because they wear a uniform, carry a caseload or work inside the system, they somehow become immune to the human consequences of what they see.

They don’t.

They are human beings.

Every assault leaves a mark.

Every death witnessed can leave a mark.

Every threat, every confrontation, every traumatic incident and every difficult intervention can accumulate until the weight becomes unbearable.

And still they turn up.

Still they unlock the doors.

Still they answer the phones.

Still they visit people in the community.

Still they manage risk.

Still they protect victims.

Still they protect the public.

Still they try to save lives.

The criminal justice system measures what goes wrong.

It rarely measures everything its staff stop from going wrong.

So today, CJWU wants to say something that should never need saying:

We see you.

To the prison officer who prevented a death.

To the probation practitioner who recognised a crisis.

To the staff member who walked onto a violent wing.

To the colleague who sat beside someone in their darkest moment.

To everyone who has gone home after a traumatic shift, composed themselves, and returned the next day because people depended upon them.

Your work matters.

You do far more than lock doors.

You protect lives.

And the fact that so much of what you achieve never appears in a statistic does not make it any less extraordinary.

The criminal justice workforce deserves more than thanks after tragedy.

It deserves protection, proper support and recognition before the damage is done.

CJWU - standing with the people who protect others, even when nobody sees what they do.

12/08/2026

CJWU News
We are very pleased to announce that
Mandi Howells from Swansea has joined us as EC Representative for OSG’s

05/08/2026

BREAKING NEWS: Politicians have once again discovered that taking credit is considerably easier than recruiting prison officers.

This week’s triumph? The announcement of 3,000 “new” prison places.

Magnificent…!

It’s almost as impressive as claiming you built a house because you turned up to cut the ribbon after someone else poured the foundations.

HMP Millsike began life under the previous Government before opening under this one. Yet somehow, every political party is queuing up to tell us it’s their masterpiece. By this logic, the next government can probably claim the moon because they’ll be in office when it rises.

Meanwhile, back in the real world…

You can build as many prisons as you like. If you don’t fund them properly, recruit enough staff, or retain the experienced officers who are leaving in droves, all you’ve created is a very expensive monument to political vanity.

It’s a bit like buying a fleet of buses and forgetting to employ any drivers.

But don’t let reality interrupt a good press release.

The political class measures success in press conferences.

Frontline criminal justice workers measure it in vacant posts, cancelled training, endless overtime, assaults, burnout, sickness, and somehow getting everyone home safely at the end of another understaffed shift.

Every election brings another cast of actors promising they’ll be the ones to “fix” prisons. Then they discover the revolutionary strategy of blaming the people before them while expecting staff to perform miracles with less money, fewer colleagues and even greater expectations.

The script never changes. Only the colour of the rosette.

Red blames Blue.
Blue blames Red.
The public blames prison staff.
And prison staff quietly get on with holding together a justice system that politicians have spent decades treating like a neglected garden shed.

So congratulations on the new prison places.

Now try filling them.

With staff.

Not headlines!

Because the only thing this country has produced in greater numbers than prison places over the last twenty years… is politicians claiming credit for someone else’s work while leaving frontline workers to clear up someone else’s mess.

30/07/2026

CJWU Statement: Rising Recall Figures Expose a Government That Has Lost Control of Criminal Justice

The latest offender recall figures should shatter any remaining illusion that the Government’s approach to criminal justice is working.

For years, the Criminal Justice Workers Union (CJWU) has warned that prisons and probation cannot continue to absorb political failures without consequence. Those warnings have been ignored, and today the evidence is plain to see.

As recall numbers continue to rise, probation staff are being expected to shoulder an impossible burden. Every recall demands detailed assessment, complex risk management and swift professional judgement. These are not simple administrative exercises; they are decisions that can determine whether the public remains safe.

Yet this Government continues to expect probation professionals to perform miracles while systematically starving the service of the investment it desperately needs.

Across the country, probation teams are battling relentless workloads, escalating complexity, staff shortages and sickness levels driven by stress and burnout. Experienced professionals are walking away from a profession they once loved because they simply cannot continue carrying impossible caseloads with dwindling resources and little recognition.

Despite this, Ministers continue to gamble with public protection through reactive policies, including repeated early release measures designed to relieve pressure on an overcrowded prison estate without addressing the fundamental causes of the crisis.

Early release may ease pressure inside prison walls for a matter of weeks or months, but the responsibility does not disappear, it lands squarely on the desks of already exhausted probation staff expected to manage increasing numbers of high-risk individuals in the community.

This is not strategic leadership.

It is crisis management dressed up as reform.

It is probation staff who are left to manage the consequences when political decisions collide with operational reality. They are expected to protect victims, reassure communities, enforce licence conditions, make difficult recall decisions and respond to escalating risk - all while working in a service that has endured years of underinvestment and relentless pressure.

The Government cannot continue congratulating itself for managing prison capacity while ignoring the damage being inflicted on probation. A criminal justice system is only as strong as its weakest link, and successive governments have allowed probation to become one of the most overstretched public services in the country.

The CJWU has had enough of warm words and empty promises.

Our members do not need another review. They do not need another ministerial visit or carefully choreographed announcement. They need colleagues. They need investment. They need manageable workloads. They need fair pay that reflects the enormous responsibility they carry, and they need a Government willing to confront the reality of the crisis rather than simply move it from prison gates into the community.

Probation staff continue to deliver extraordinary professionalism under extraordinary pressure. Their dedication has protected the public despite a system that too often appears to work against them rather than with them.

But dedication is not an unlimited resource.

No workforce can be expected to absorb endless political failures, rising demand and chronic underfunding without consequence. Burnout is rising. Stress-related sickness is rising. Recruitment and retention remain major challenges. These are not isolated workforce issues, they are symptoms of a service being pushed beyond its operational limits.

The public deserves honesty.

If Government is serious about public protection, it must stop treating probation as the forgotten arm of criminal justice and start investing in the people who carry one of the greatest responsibilities in public service every single day.

The latest recall figures are not merely numbers on a spreadsheet.

They are a warning.

A warning that probation has reached the point where exceptional staff are being asked to compensate for exceptional political failure.

The CJWU stands shoulder to shoulder with every probation professional working tirelessly to keep our communities safe. They have upheld their duty under immense pressure.

It is time the Government upheld theirs.

28/07/2026

27/07/2026

CJWU Statement on the Government’s Decision to Pause the Early Release Scheme

The Criminal Justice Workers Union (CJWU) welcomes the Government’s decision to pause the proposed early release scheme. It is a recognition, albeit a delayed one, that public safety, the confidence of victims and the professional judgement of frontline criminal justice workers cannot simply be overridden in an attempt to manage a crisis created by years of political failure.

Let’s be absolutely clear: the overcrowding crisis in our prisons was not created by prison officers, probation staff, operational support grades, administrators or any other frontline criminal justice worker. It is the consequence of successive governments failing to invest in the infrastructure, staffing and long-term planning that a safe and effective justice system demands.

For years, ministers have asked dedicated staff to do more with less. Less funding. Fewer colleagues. Ageing prisons. Rising violence. Increasingly complex offenders. Record workloads in probation. Yet despite these impossible conditions, it is criminal justice workers who have continued to keep the public safe.

The pause to the early release scheme is welcome, but it must not become another exercise in political damage limitation. Criminal justice workers have seen too many announcements designed to generate headlines, only for meaningful change to disappear once public attention moves on.

The Prime Minister now has an opportunity to demonstrate that this Government is prepared to govern differently. The CJWU will judge this decision not by today’s press release, but by the actions that follow in the weeks and months ahead.

If this pause is genuine, it must be accompanied by substantial investment across the criminal justice system. That means recruiting and retaining staff through fair pay, improving working conditions, restoring confidence in probation, investing in prison capacity, modernising ageing estates and giving frontline professionals the resources they need to do their jobs safely and effectively.

The reality is simple. You cannot build a safer society on an underfunded criminal justice system. You cannot ask exhausted staff to endlessly absorb the consequences of political indecision. And you cannot continue treating emergency measures as a substitute for competent government.

The CJWU supports the decision to pause the early release scheme because public protection must always come first. But support for this decision should not be mistaken for approval of the circumstances that made it necessary.

Our members deserve better leadership. Victims deserve greater confidence in the justice system. The public deserves honesty. And the criminal justice system deserves sustained investment, strategic management and ministers prepared to confront difficult truths instead of managing perpetual crises.

The time for short-term fixes has passed. Criminal justice workers have carried this system on their shoulders for long enough. It is now time for Government to carry its share of the responsibility.

Aaron Stowe
National President
Criminal Justice Workers Union (CJWU)

22/07/2026

There is nothing amusing about releasing thousands of offenders early.

Nothing.

Yet, this week the public witnessed senior ministers laughing and joking in relation to a policy that has left victims fearful, frontline staff anxious and communities questioning whether public safety has become secondary to political convenience. Whatever the intention behind those remarks, the message they sent could not have been more damaging. (Currently⁠)

Behind the secure gates of Whitehall, surrounded by advisers, security and official cars, perhaps this policy feels like another political discussion.

Outside that bubble, it is anything but.

It is the victim wondering whether the person who changed their life forever will be released sooner than expected.

It is the probation officer already carrying an impossible workload, expected to safely manage yet more high-risk individuals with finite resources.

It is the prison officer who knows full well that overcrowding has not been solved, only shifted elsewhere.

It is families asking whether public protection has been compromised because successive governments failed to plan for a prison system under relentless pressure.

These are not theoretical debates.

These are real people.

Real victims.

Real frontline workers.

Real communities.

The early release scheme has already generated significant concern from victims’ representatives about whether adequate safeguards, risk management and support are in place before offenders return to the community. Those concerns deserve respect, not an appearance of levity. (The Guardian⁠)

Leadership demands judgement.

Leadership demands empathy.

And above all, leadership demands recognising when an issue is simply too serious for jokes.

The Criminal Justice Workers Union stands with every prison officer, probation worker and member of prison staff who will be expected to manage the consequences of these decisions professionally, despite feeling that their warnings have too often been ignored.

Public confidence in our justice system is fragile.

It is not strengthened by laughter.

It is strengthened by honesty, accountability and a government that treats the safety of victims and the public with the seriousness it deserves.