Prisons tend not to draw political attention except when they go wrong, and even then they have to go badly wrong. There are strong incentives for governments to neglect a service used by relatively few voters, and prisoners themselves can’t vote. But the prison system serves the wider community in various indirect ways. Locking criminals away protects the public. Conviction and punishment signal to society that justice is being done. Rehabilitation inside jails reduces reoffending. All of those functions are now breaking down, and the collapse is getting increasingly hard to ignore.
Last week it emerged that some prisoners serving short sentences will be eligible for release 70 days early, not because they have necessarily earned their freedom but because jails are full. This is the third such relaxation since October 2023 when the discount was 18 days, rising to 60 in March this year. Meanwhile, it has been reported that police forces in England and Wales have been advised to make fewer arrests because there are not enough available cells.
None of this comes as a surprise to anyone who has followed the steady and steep deterioration of the criminal justice system. Political pressure for ever tougher sentences has not been matched with funding for new places. Higher numbers of people have been housed on a decaying estate. The prison population in April was 87,915. Government projections indicate a plausible rise to well over 100,000 in coming years, while operational capacity is 89,000.
Ministers have pledged to create more places but it isn’t clear how this can happen when budgets are being squeezed. Under the Tories’ fiscal rules tax cuts require a squeeze of around £19bn on “unprotected” Whitehall departments. Labour must repudiate such austerity. If implemented, it would imply both more overcrowding in conditions that are already appalling, and sending fewer people to prison in the first place.
The latter expedient has a certain logic. Britain jails too many minor offenders, many of whom have mental health and drug-related problems made worse by incarceration. This is one reason why recidivism is so high – the system incubates and entrenches criminality more than it reforms criminals. But ministers are too often afraid of advocating non-custodial sentences for fear of being judged “soft” on crime. This government’s sentencing bill, which mandates more early release and increases sentences for some serious crimes, won’t make it on to the statute book.
Cost constraint is not the only cause of this crisis. A backlog in cases coming to court was exacerbated by the pandemic, but that effect was more severe because underfunding stripped resilience out of the system. But under Rishi Sunak, Britain’s jails are in crisis. Prison capacity is a significant obstacle to reducing the backlog in the crown courts, which stands at a record 67,573 cases. Even if the judges and time could be found to process the backlog faster, there would still be the problem of where to send those who are convicted.
At every stage of the process – investigating crime, making arrests, securing conviction, punishing and rehabilitating offenders – the criminal justice system is not working. That is not an ordinary negligence of a public service. It is a failure of government in a basic duty to keep citizens safe and a forfeiture of the right to govern at all.
