The criminal justice system is close to collapse. Don’t take my word for it. “The entire criminal justice system stands on the precipice of failure,” warned the Prison Governors’ Association (PGA) this week, as it notified politicians that prisons in England and Wales are quite literally full. Meanwhile, two judges who ruled on legal aid cuts in February, concluded: “Unless there are significant injections of funding in the relatively near future, any prediction … that the system will arrive in due course at a point of collapse is not overly pessimistic.”
Whoever comes into power on 5 July will have to move quickly to address this. But observing the election campaign, you would have little sense of the scale of the interrelated crises in the prison and court systems. Politicians on both sides, nervous about seeming soft on crime, are reluctant to talk about reducing sentence times, improving miserable prison conditions, and whether we actually want a ballooning prison population. (England and Wales have the highest per capita prison population in western Europe.) The irony is that while trying to appear tough, Conservative governments have brought the justice system – our primary mechanism for dealing with crime – to its knees.
