There are just over a thousand men’s prison places left in the UK out of a total of 88,618 total. Where does the government go from here? Are our prisons about to run out of space? If they do, will we see even earlier releases?
To put these figures from the start of the week in context, in August 2024 there were only around 700 spaces available. In the aftermath of the Summer riots there were concerns that courts might have to stop jailing people. Disaster was only averted by the government’s early release scheme, SDS40, under which thousands of additional prisoners were released in September and October. Meanwhile, David Gauke’s Sentencing Review has been underway since October, and has described our prisons as ‘on the brink of collapse’.
The additional capacity should just about keep ahead of the rising prison population
Available spaces are dropping by around 200 per week. If nothing else changed this would mean no more capacity by the time the clocks go forward. The government is, naturally, determined to avoid that nightmare scenario. But how?
Thankfully, SDS40 bought just enough time. HMP Millsike, a new 1,500-capacity jail will open in Yorkshire next month. Meanwhile, the government’s prison expansion efforts will add hundreds more places across the estate this year.
Of course, prison places are not all the same. Inmates must be jailed in appropriate security conditions and ideally in suitable parts of the country. To this end, the prison service has become more creative, moving people to open conditions earlier in their sentence. Assuming prisoners are properly risk-assessed this is a positive step. Open jails allow prisoners to truly rehabilitate, and even take paying work, pay taxes and save money for their release.
I have also heard suggestions that the London region has begun to house Category B prisoners at HMP Brixton, a Category C jail, with the hope that this reduces pressure on ‘reception’ jails like Wandsworth and Wormwood Scrubs, which hold remand prisoners and the newly-sentenced. Again this is promising. Reception jails are often the worst in the system, with high levels of drug use, violence and self-harm, made worse thanks to overcrowding.
These particular jails also often have high levels of deaths. On Monday, I attended the first day of the inquest into the death of Rajwinder Singh, a man who died at Wandsworth in 2023, less than two weeks into a four year sentence. It was a brutal reminder that the prisons’ crisis has a real and terrible cost. Rajwinder had three children. The courts sentenced him to four years, not death. Rajwinder was one of five men who died at Wandsworth that year. In addition to the need to deliver punishment, public protection and rehabilitation, there is a moral urgency to saving our worst jails.
In the longer run, Labour’s strategy rests on the Sentencing Review. When it reports in the Spring, it is to be expected that Gauke will recommend much greater use of community sentences, scrapping mandatory minimum sentences and shorter periods of supervision by probation, all with the aim of reducing the prison population. We’re also likely to see a greater use of ‘tagging’ to supervise or curfew people instead of jailing them. I understand that the government will act quickly to implement the review’s findings, and that they expect the impact to be felt by early next year.
So for the next twelve months, the government has to find a way through. They inherited a disaster in July, but I understand that they believe they’re going to make it. The additional capacity should just about keep ahead of the rising prison population, and then next year pressures will begin to ease. If this proves to be the case then they will deserve praise. Prisons minister James Timpson and Justice Secretary Shabana Mahmood could not have been dealt a worse hand.
Of course, the next risk is that the changes recommended by the Sentencing Review don’t work. If fewer prison sentences mean more crime, and probation prove unable to effectively supervise many more offenders, then the government may find that they face a public backlash. A lot rests on improving the probation service. There must be doubts about this after high-profile failures to fit curfew tags last year, and data which suggests significant backlogs have existed on ‘sobriety tags’.
The stakes are very high, but the potential prize – a justice system which turns people away from crime instead of destroying them – is even greater. We should all hope the government’s ideas work.
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