how the UKs prison system has failed

Ask chief inspector of prisons Charlie Taylor for the most shocking example of overcrowding in Britain’s jails and he immediately names HMP Brixton in south London.

The Victorian jail has been home to prisoners for two centuries – since 1819 – and is still in use, with two men crammed into 6ft by 12ft cells. “They are palpably some of the smallest in the prison estate,” says Mr Taylor.

“What’s particularly nasty about them is the lavatory. Rather than being in the corner of the cell, it is opposite the bunk bed halfway down the wall and then a sink. The level of squalidity and crampedness is pretty astonishing.”

It is one of 14 Victorian prisons in England and Wales that, in an ideal world, Mr Taylor would shut and replace with new-design jails where reinforced glass windows replace bars and prisoners have a desk to work on, an en-suite shower and a single bed.

Few may have sympathy with the plight of a prisoner serving their time in HMP Brixton for an offence that might have blighted the life of an innocent member of the public but the point is that the conditions and regime are working against the prospect of rehabilitating offenders and preventing them from returning to crime after their release.

Prisons, often ignored in the national discourse, have moved centre stage because, for the first time in 16 years, they are literally full to overflowing, forcing the Government to contemplate an executive early release scheme for jailed offenders to ease the pressure.

Figures show that prisons like Brixton but also Wandsworth – where a terror suspect escaped last month – Leeds, Durham, Preston, Bedford, Swansea and Doncaster have as many as 80 per cent more inmates than they were originally designed to hold.

There are fewer than 600 prison places left in the whole of England and Wales, leaving ministers at risk of failing in their duty to protect the public by being able to imprison criminals jailed by the courts.

On Monday, Alex Chalk, the Justice Secretary, will announce “reforms” that aim to relieve the immediate pressure by freeing hundreds of prisoners weeks, if not months, earlier than their scheduled release date and recalibrating the way justice is administered.

At its heart will be the resurrection of a plan first mooted by his predecessor, David Gauke, who wanted to abolish short prison sentences of at least under six months and instead try to rehabilitate offenders in the community by treating the causes of their crime: whether drugs, drink or mental ill health.

Many penal experts believe the decision to junk that plan sowed the seeds of the present crisis by allowing jails to continue filling up with prisoners on a never-ending cycle of short-term sentences in overcrowded prisons where governors despaired of turning round inmates’ lives during their two, three or four months inside.

Mr Taylor cites as an illustration one heroin-addicted offender jailed for six months for shoplifting whose lawyer told Birkenhead magistrates last December that he felt “quite at home” in the local jail, liked the staff and felt keenly aware a cold winter was coming.

“What governors say is: ‘We don’t know what to do. When we’ve got a prisoner who comes to us for two months, we can just about stabilise them on methadone if they’re a drug user before they leave.’ It becomes like a very expensive hostel rather than something that’s going to help them to help to move them on,” he says.

Rishi Sunak has apparently bitten the bullet and his Justice Secretary will try to sell a version of the Gauke plan to sceptical backbenchers and the public, fed for the past four years on a “red meat” diet of longer sentences and crime crackdowns fuelled by the 20,000 extra police officers recruited to catch and jail more criminals.

Judges and magistrates will be placed under the “presumption” to avoid sending offenders to jail for theft, shoplifting, drink-driving, drug dealing and public disorder if they are likely to serve sentences of less than six months, or possibly a year. Any sexual or violent offender would be excluded.

Critical to the success of the plan will be convincing the public that there are viable and robust alternatives to jail for lower-tier offenders, and that, at the other end of the scale, the Government is genuinely taking a tough approach to the “really bad guys” – the most dangerous offenders – by locking them up for longer.

“The public needs to be convinced that there is a fair, reasonable alternative and not a cop-out way of dealing with people. People will understandably just feel resentful if they see the person who did whatever they did get out and feel nothing has changed from that,” says Mr Taylor.

Prior pledges under the spotlight

That the situation has arrived at such a dramatic change in penal policy as the one now being mooted underlines the seriousness of the prison overcrowding crisis. In essence, it stems from the failure of the Government to build or create enough prison places to keep pace with the demand of offenders being churned out by the courts.

At the last election, the Conservative Party pledged to build 20,000 new cells at a cost of nearly £4 billion by the mid-2020s to cater for a prison population that was estimated to grow from 79,235 in September 2020 to around 106,000 by 2027.

However, fewer than half of these places will have been delivered by March 2025, according to senior officials within the Ministry of Justice (MoJ). Plans for three new mega-prisons in Lancashire, Leicestershire and Buckinghamshire are in limbo, mired in planning objections by local councils, MPs and residents.

A perfect storm of factors has crystallised the crisis. Firstly, more prisoners are serving longer sentences, up by a third in a decade. Some 56 per cent of “determinate” sentences are over four years now, compared with 40 per cent in 2013. Life sentences have jumped from 12 to 20 years on average: there are now 7,000 “lifers” in the prison population.

The second issue is that the number of prisoners on remand is at a 50-year high of nearly 16,000, accounting for a fifth of the entire prison estate and up 16 per cent in the space of just a year. There are now 6,000 more prisoners on remand than before 2020, a symptom of the delays in bringing cases to trial during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Thirdly, the courts are ramping up to clear the record backlog of 65,000, helped by the MoJ’s pledge to fund as many court sitting days as judges can manage. More cases are also coming to court as the impact of the 20,000 extra police officers starts to bite. In August alone, 10,137 new cases flowed into the courts, MoJ figures show.

The consequence is an overloaded prison system with many jails unable to deliver a regime that can rehabilitate offenders and even – as the escape from Wandsworth suggested – protect the public.

Front-line prison officers have been leaving at a rate of 13 per cent, including many experienced officers. It means the workforce is increasingly young and inexperienced with 36 per cent having been in the job for under three years.

In a tight jobs market, prisons have struggled to compete. An internal MoJ document in August revealed that 15 per cent of prisons were expected to have below 80 per cent of the staff they need. Last week, an inspection report said that HMP Wandsworth could not function effectively because only half of its staff were available on any one day.

A 2022-23 survey by HM Inspectorate of Prisons, headed by Mr Taylor, found that 42 per cent of prisoners were in their cells for 22 hours a day during weekdays, limiting their opportunities for work, training or education.

“There are some issues of our time which are particularly acute,” says Mr Taylor. “Overcrowding at the moment. Struggling to get prison officers of sufficient quality who will stick around for long enough to become good, experienced, high-quality people.

“And prisoners having enough to do that is genuinely productive, that is really going to make a difference as to whether they commit another offence when they come out or not.”

To this end, Mr Chalk’s plan for the early release of some prisoners and fewer inmates on short-term sentences is designed to free up space to tackle the crisis, as he attempts to build modern jails with better conditions, workshops, training facilities and links into local job markets.

“The evidence shows that community sentences can be more effective in reducing reoffending than short-term prison sentences,” says one source. “Because prisons are so full, people are not being rehabilitated properly. There will be criticism, but we strongly feel it is a good thing and the right thing to do.”

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