Turning laundry rooms into cells, as the justice secretary has proposed, will put even more pressure on our understaffed and overcrowded prisons (Burnham warned running prison capacity near limit is ‘big risk’, 1 September). This will, in turn, make it even less likely that people in prison will be able to access the education and training that will help them to turn their lives around.
Education in prison is proven to reduce reoffending and get more people into work. But we’ve already seen provision slashed by a quarter in prisons this year. Just this week, an inspection of a prison in northern England found that there were not enough places in education and many men were frustrated at the lack of opportunity to progress in their sentence.
