A 21-year-old student, named only as Emily, is calling on the government to reconsider planned changes to prisoner early release after she was attacked while walking home in Sheffield in April by a man freed early from a previous sentence for a similar offence. Her attacker, Matthew Ward, 21, had been jailed for 22 months following an assault in Nottingham in 2025 but was released under a scheme introduced to ease severe prison overcrowding, and had reportedly been out for only days before attacking Emily.

Emily says she has little memory of the assault due to the severity of her injuries, and was found badly hurt after her parents grew concerned by a muffled voicemail and tracked her phone to Sheffield, where Ward had disposed of it in a bin. She says she remains angry that Ward was deemed safe for release so soon after a previous conviction for assault and suffocation. Under the current scheme, standard fixed-term offenders can be freed after serving 50% of their sentence, and under the new Sentencing Act due in September, around 6,000 prisoners were set to be released at various points, with most fixed-term offenders affected.