The government’s Sentencing Bill, currently progressing through Parliament, proposes reducing prison sentences for “good behaviour.” On the surface, this sounds like a progressive reform, rewarding rehabilitation and incentivising positive conduct. In reality, without rigorous safeguards, training, and oversight, it risks embedding corruption, inequality, and arbitrariness deep into the prison system.

Under the proposals, offender managers and prison officers would play a significant role in determining whether a prisoner has demonstrated “good behaviour” sufficient to justify early release. This raises immediate and serious concerns. Prison officers are not trained risk assessors, nor are they qualified to evaluate long-term harm, rehabilitation, or public safety. These judgments are complex, requiring psychological, social, and criminological expertise, not informal observations made in chronically understaffed prisons.

The lack of independent oversight is equally alarming. Giving prison staff discretionary power over sentence length creates fertile ground for abuse. Decisions may be influenced by personal bias, institutional culture, or favouritism. In the worst cases, it opens the door to corruption. When liberty itself becomes contingent on subjective approval, the rule of law is weakened.

Nowhere are these dangers more acute than in women’s prisons. Many women’s prisons are effectively in permanent lockdown, with prisoners confined to their cells for up to 23 hours a day. Education programmes, vocational training, and paid work – key ways prisoners are expected to evidence “good behaviour” or “progress” – are limited or non-existent. Women cannot demonstrate engagement in rehabilitation if the system denies them access to it.

This creates a deeply unfair catch-22. Women are told they must show progress, responsibility, and good behaviour, yet are deprived of the very opportunities that would allow them to do so. The result is structural discrimination. Sentence reductions become accessible to those in better-resourced prisons, while women, already overrepresented among the vulnerable and traumatised, are left behind.

Good behaviour should not be measured by compliance alone, nor determined by untrained gatekeepers. If sentence reduction schemes are to exist, they must be grounded in transparent criteria, assessed by independent, properly qualified professionals, and supported by meaningful access to education, work, and rehabilitation.

Without these protections, the Sentencing Bill risks replacing judicial oversight with discretionary punishment, and turning “good behaviour” into another tool of systemic injustice rather than genuine reform.