Part one asked whether letting prisoners out early is safe, and found that nobody has checked. Part two asks the harder half: who chose this, what it costs, and what I could not pin down no matter how many documents I opened.

WHAT'S IN IT

• The plan for the next time the prisons fill up — written down, signed off, and not a plan to stop

• The steelman, read straight: the government's own best case for the Sentencing Act, in the minister's exact words

• A 2007 speech and a 2026 speech, nineteen years apart, making the same promise in nearly the same sentence

• The bill: a prison expansion portfolio of up to ten billion pounds, and the auditor's verdict on the tags everything now depends on — "Overall EM is not working as intended, creating public protection risks"

• The strangest thing I found: the law says rele ...