With prisons bursting at their seams, leaving the government no choice but to schedule the early release of more than 5,000 prisoners, the state of law and order in Britain seems to be resting on a precariously wobbly tipping point. On the 12th July, Justice Secretary, Shabana Mahmood revealed the overwhelmingly high England and Wales prison population of 87,505, just a mere thousand away from the total “usable operational capacity” of 88,956. This has now dropped to fewer than 100.
Prisons are running out of space, and quickly. The consequences of this are resoundingly dire. Without any prison spaces, the entirety of the criminal justice system is severely undermined. Procedures such as ‘Operation Early Dawn’, whereby defendants remain in police custody, have already been undertaken, alongside police officers being told to make fewer arrests. In light of the civil strife fuelled by the recent UK riots, the curtailing of the police’s ability to make arrests is alarming. In his 2018 Prisons Reform Speech, Former Justice Secretary David Gauke stated that “depriving someone of their liberty for a period of time is one of the most significant powers available to the State and must be imposed with respect for the rule of law and with purpose”. With this power now significantly constrained, how can the State maintain its role as enforcer of law and order? With restricted opportunities to arrest criminals, and nowhere to send them, the initial aftermath of the prison overcrowding crisis poses a serious and immediate threat to public safety.
Labelling the crisis as “the legacy of the last Conservative government”, Mahmood apportions blame to the Conservative’s neglect of the issue. Indeed, despite the Conservative government’s pledge in 2021 to create a further 20,000 prison places by the mid 2020’s, only 6,000 have materialised. Furthermore, only £1.1 billion of the £4 billion budget for these projects has been spent. Undoubtedly, the Conservative Party has stood to the side whilst watching the pot boil over. Earlier intervention would have been indispensable in preventing the point of implosion which prisons are currently facing.
With this being said, it is important to note the other, far more systemic, factors at play here. Over the last decade, prison sentences have significantly increased, with the Institute for Government stating in 2023 that average prison sentences issued in England and Wales were 25% longer than they were in 2012. Ultimately, longer sentences result in more people taking up prison capacity for longer periods of time. Moreover, the backlog of remand prisoners has hit a peak of 16,458, further contributing to overcrowded prisons.
What must be stressed above all is the UK’s staggeringly high recidivism rate. The overall reoffending rate for prisoners is 25.8%, dramatically rising to 56.1% for prisoners who served sentences for less than 12 months. Finding short term prison sentences to be less effective at reducing recidivism than community sentences, the Prison Reform Trust suggests that ultimately prison is overused as punishment for petty crime. In this light, I would like to compare the function of a prison to the function of a hospital. In the most simplistic terms, if a hospital wanted to reduce the number of their sick patients, the most immediately effective means of doing so would be to adequately treat them. Thereby, the patients not only leave the hospital, but, having been treated, are less likely to come back. One look at the reoffending rates in Britain would insinuate that British prisons are horrendously failing in their ability to ‘cure’ crime. If the purpose of prisons is for protection, punishment, incapacitation, and rehabilitation, then they are falling drastically short on the final and arguably most important hurdle: rehabilitation. This begs the question: Do prisons work?
Amongst the defenders of the current prison system is Conservative MP Neil O’ Brien, who points to the UK’s own history as an example. He cites that after Michael Howard ran up the prison population, crime fell. Furthermore, he lists countless examples of criminals reoffending after having been released early to suggest the preferability of keeping criminals behind bars for longer. I would, however, take issue here. The UK’s high number of reoffenders is a blatant example of how the prison system is currently inefficient. In his investigation into reoffending within the criminal justice system, Chris Atkins found that “80% of all crimes are committed by people who’ve been to jail or been through the criminal justice system before”. Surely then, the problem lies within the prisons.
The conditions within UK prisons are far from decent. With archaic structures, rampant drug problems and prisoner violence, over half of prison inmates declared feeling “unsafe” in 35 prisons across the UK, with many saying that their time in prison made them more likely to reoffend. In other words, the UK prisons construct themselves to be breeding grounds of further brutality.
It is particularly interesting to compare these circumstances to the prison system in Norway. After suffering a recidivism rate of 60-70%, Norwegian prisons switched their focus away from retribution and towards rehabilitation at the beginning of the 1990’s. Now, Norway’s maximum-security prison: Halden Prison, does not need security cameras, electric fences nor barbed wires. Instead, inmates spend their days engaging in yoga classes, residing in ensuite rooms rather than cells, and learning essential skills such as woodwork and mechanics, enabling a higher chance at successful reintegration into society. Whilst these prison places are noticeably more expensive (a place at Halden prison costs £98,000, almost double the UK average of £51,724 a year) they reap a high success rate. Norway boasts a significantly lower recidivism rate of 20% and only locks up 63 per 100,000 people a year compared to the UK’s 134 prisoners per 100,000 people. Are Hoidal, governor of the Halden prison and Senior Advisor to the Norwegian Correctional Services, elaborates on this, poignantly stating “If we treat inmates like animals in prison, then we will release animals on to your street”.
It is my belief that the sentiment of Hoidal’s statement rings true. The dehumanising conditions of prisons in the UK overwhelmingly projects the external expectation upon prisoners that they are inherently wicked people, undeserving of human rights and of redemption. The UK is trapped within a system that is not only “addicted to punishment” but addicted to inefficient punishment. The overall reoffending crisis costs the taxpayer £18 billion. It is in no one’s best interest for prisons to breed an environment where recidivism is high. Prisoners ought to be given the chance to break the cycle of crime, rather than become the self-fulfilling prophecy by which they are suffocated. This begins within the operations of our prison system.
While the early release of prisoners may appear like a convenient quick fix in the short-term, it represents a poor attempt at solving the underlying issue. In effect, instead of treating the blistering wound within our prisons, we are slapping on it a flimsy plaster that is bound to rip open soon. Whilst our prisons stay the same, a high proportion of the prisoners released will merely feed back into the system, causing a resurgence of the same problems in due time. The long-term solution to this issue therefore ought to involve a serious re-evaluation of the UK’s prison system: the conditions within prisons, the way in which we treat criminals and, most importantly, the focus on rehabilitation. In order to make the country’s prison system most efficient, and avoid the present problems of overcrowding returning in the future, the UK must move away from a revenge-based system of criminal justice. In their current state, UK prisons do not work, and the country’s crumbling law and order will continue to hang in the balance until they do.
Image: Wikimedia Commons/The wub
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