Prisons in England and Wales are on the verge of overflowing, unable to accommodate any more inmates. The crisis has been dragging on for more than a year, and the new Labour government has had to make the issue a priority. “What we have found is shocking. Much worse than I thought (…) It is the demonstration of the total failure of a government,” Prime Minister Keir Starmer confessed with alarm this week. The Minister of Justice, the Muslim lawyer, Shabana Mahmood, announced on Friday emergency measures to alleviate the situation.
Starting in September, the Government will make a provisional decision to allow certain prisoners to be released after serving 40% of their sentence. This will apply to all those serving sentences of less than four years, and excludes those who have committed violent crimes, acts related to terrorism, sexual assault or gender violence, as well as those who have been sentenced to life imprisonment subject to review.
In all cases covered by the new measures, it was already normal for prisoners to be released on parole after serving 50% of their sentence. The minister has announced that 1,000 new parole officers will be incorporated into the judicial system.
The announced measures could mean that up to 20,000 prisoners will be released earlier than expected.
“If we run out of prison space, the country faces the prospect of dangerous people roaming around the UK with nowhere to go,” police officers unable to stop criminals and “gangs of looters running riot,” said Mahmood, visiting Five Wells prison in Northamptonshire. It is a relatively modern prison, but he had previously been to Bedford, built in the early 19th century.
The minister said that prisons would run out of available space “in a matter of weeks” and that the situation would lead “to the collapse of law and order.”
Knowing what’s happening outside means understanding what’s going to happen inside, so don’t miss anything.
KEEP READING
Although the picture presented by the incoming government is somewhat exaggerated Dickensian, presenting the prison system inherited from the Tories Almost like the oppressive and unjust Victorian underworld described by the English writer, the figures are truly alarming.
The optimal capacity of prisons in England and Wales is 88,956 inmates. As of Friday, according to the latest official figures, there were 87,505 people incarcerated (83,859 men and 3,646 women). That is, there is free space for just over 1,400 prisoners. But just a year ago the total prison population was 86,035 inmates. At that rate of growth, the situation seemed unsustainable.
Prisons have been operating at 99% capacity for the past year and a half, with hundreds of new inmates being added each week.
The temporary, and undesirable, solution would be to use the cells in police stations themselves. “If we end up flooding the spaces in police stations, the police will be unable to arrest anyone because they won’t have space to put them in,” Mark Fairhurst, president of the Association of Prison Officers, warned on the BBC.
An inherited problem
Rishi Sunak’s previous Conservative government was well aware of the prison problem. The then Justice Minister, Alex Chalk, had been insisting for months on implementing the early release of thousands of prisoners that Mahmood has now announced. The desperate electoral and political situation in which the prisoners found themselves Toriesand its candidate Sunak, led them to shelve measures that, they feared, could backfire and scare away voters. The Executive at the time merely applied some patches, discreetly bringing forward the supervised release of some prisoners by up to 70 days.
The trend in recent years, not only among Conservative politicians but also among Labour politicians, has been to toughen their discourse on security and give priority to the preservation of law and order. Between 2012 and 2023, sentences for robbery have seen their length increase by an average of 13 months, according to a recent report by the think tank Institute for Government.
Added to this is the backlog in the British justice system, with prisons becoming overcrowded with prisoners on remand who still do not know their exact sentence. The new Labour government is in a state of panic at the prospect of prison riots breaking out during its first weeks in office.
The challenge of gender violence
One of the flagship promises of the Labour election manifesto, largely drawn up by a candidate – Starmer – who was previously a lawyer and head of the Crown Prosecution Service, was to take a firm stand against the scourge of gender violence – which in the United Kingdom is still called domestic violence – that the country suffers from.
Starmer’s pledge aims to halve such cases within a decade, with specialised gender-based violence courts and specialist teams to handle 999 calls. But Nicole Jacobs, who has been High Commissioner for Domestic Abuse since 2019, sent Starmer a letter before the election warning that the prison crisis had coincided with a time when domestic violence convictions had been particularly low. Just three in 10 rape defendants ended up in prison.
If Labour’s plan to get tougher on abusers went ahead, Jacobs warned, the number of extra prisoners could rise by 10,000 each year.
The situation has become a significant challenge for Starmer and his Secretary of State for Prisons, James Timpson, a liberal-minded and reformist politician who aspires to introduce improvements to the system that prioritise its rehabilitative rather than punitive function.
This long-term plan, however, must be combined with a tough policy against criminals, as promised by the new prime minister, and not be aggravated by unforeseen consequences, in the form of new crimes at the hands of those recently released, which would be conveniently exploited by conservative tabloids and would irreparably damage the image of the incoming government.
Follow all the international information atFacebook andXor inour weekly newsletter.