modeller;. there are not 12,000 murderers in British prisons. There are some 6,000 lifers at present, according to the official from the Association of Probation Officers on Sky News this morning.
. In 2008, there were 10,911 prisoners serving life or ;indeterminate sentences for public protection'.Of those 4,170 were in the later category leaving 6,741 serving life.(Not all of these are murderers. They include rapists, arsonists and other serious offenders for whom life imprisonment was the sentence)
There were 648 homicides ( murders, manslaughters and infanticides ) recorded last year. That's the lowest for some years. The usual number is closer to 700.
If 2,000 murderers were really released last year that would be one third of all the people serving life .At that rate the jails would have no murderers in them at all in very short order ! Since there were only 648 homicides of all kinds, we'd be releasing at three times the rate of new homicide prisoners (not just murderers) that we took in in the year whilst releasing all serving prisoners in three years
Released after 16 months . Impossible since a minimum term is always set and a person cannot be released before then. No judge would set a minimum term of 16 months.It may be that years ago, when no mimimum was set , that was theoretically possible, but would not happen in fact because he'd have served the equivalent of about a 3 year sentence, less than the sentences for s18 gbh or manslaughter.
It being the Daily Mail that you say gave this, one would suspect that the author has been playing with words. A murderer could be released from a British jail after 16 months if he proved to be insane and was transferred to Broadmoor (which is a secure hospital, not a jail) or if he was deported to serve the rest of his sentence abroad (in practice he'd normally serve more than that here)