Early prison release of domestic abusers will cost lives, murdered woman's parents warn

Michaela Hall was 49 years old, a charity worker living in Cornwall. On a day in 2021, just fourteen days after her partner Lee Kendall walked out of prison, he killed her in her home. Kendall had been locked up for assaulting Hall—the same woman he would later strangle. Police had documented 34 separate pieces of intelligence about his abuse toward her. He had threatened her with weapons. Yet when the Probation Service assessed him upon release, they marked him down as medium risk. The error meant minimal supervision. The error meant he went home.

Now her parents, Anne and Peter, are watching the government prepare to release 5,000 prisoners early starting in October. The scheme is designed to ease overcrowding in English and Welsh prisons. Domestic abusers are not being excluded. "There's going to be more violence and there's going to be more death," Peter said flatly. "The Probation Service can't cope on a day-to-day basis. They certainly can't cope with 5,000 prisoners being released."

The warning carries weight because it is rooted in documented failure. At the inquest into Michaela's death, probation staff attributed their miscalculation partly to "horrendous work pressures." The system was already drowning. Probation officers have since voted overwhelmingly in favor of strike action over excessive workloads. Martin Jones, the chief inspector of probation for England and Wales, has stated plainly that the system will not be able to manage the planned releases. The government did respond to public outcry by excluding prisoners convicted of rape, serious child sexual abuse, and grooming offences—an intervention made by Prime Minister Andy Burnham. Domestic abusers remained unexcluded.

Farah Nazeer, chief executive of Women's Aid, called the decision "really upsetting and troubling." She pointed to a hard reality: women entering refuge are being turned away at a rate of 50 percent due to lack of funding. The government announced £10 million in victim support, a national helpline, and greater involvement for victims in setting licence conditions. Nazeer said it was nowhere near sufficient. "You can't have a halving violence against women strategy and then choose to release the perpetrators of the biggest crime against women and children early," she said. "Why does the government think it's OK to trade women's safety up?"

The Hall family has launched a legal challenge under the Human Rights Act, not only against the Probation Service but also against police. On the night Michaela was murdered, a friend called emergency services to report an attack in progress. Officers arrived at the property but did not enter. As they left, one said: "What can you do if she don't help herself?" Anne Hall described the sequence of events as "a catalogue of mistakes, laziness and victim blaming." She and Peter are pursuing the case not for themselves—"It doesn't make us feel any better," Peter said—but to force change, to prevent other families from experiencing what theirs has endured. Their daughter left behind two children. The family remains, as Anne put it, "absolutely shattered."

Catherine Knight, deputy head of legal at the Good Law Project, which is representing the family, said the challenge aims to force authorities to change how they operate. "If the government wants to go ahead with the early release scheme then we need to ensure the systems supporting offenders and victims are robust and do work as they should but, at present, there are systemic issues within the service." The Ministry of Justice responded by reiterating its £700 million investment in probation and its use of electronic tagging to track offenders. The question hanging over the autumn remains unresolved: whether a system already buckling under pressure can safely absorb thousands more prisoners released into communities where their former partners and victims are waiting.