If headlines warning prisons in England and Wales are almost full sound familiar, there’s a reason: we’ve been here before.
Back in 2008, it was worryingly close when prisons came within 21 places of official capacity. So critical was the situation, the justice secretary intervened, urging magistrates to jail fewer people. And, in 2014, the government ordered 40 prisons to take 440 extra offenders between them, despite 34 of them already being at or over capacity.
Fast-forward 10 years and the current government has taken a different approach to an old problem, changing the proportion of some prisoners’ sentences to be served in custody or out on licence from 50-50 to 40-60. That has led to the early release of 1,700 people.
The crisis in the prison system is due to a number of concurrent factors, experts have said. But what are those factors, and what is the makeup of the prison population?
Tougher sentences
Taking in all criminals who receive custodial terms, there has been one clear trend over the past decade: sentences have got longer.
In 2012, the average prison sentence stood at a year and six weeks. As of 2023, the average prisoner is sent away for a year and nine months. Prison operational capacity has not increased over the same period, and was actually 1,288 places smaller this year than in June 2012.
As a result, excluding those recalled to jail after early release, prisoners with sentences of four or more years – including indeterminate sentences – made up 72% of prisoners in 2024. That figure stood at 54% in 2009.
Short-term political posturing has a significant role to play in this, experts have said. A Prison Reform Trust spokesperson said: “You see this directly from politicians who respond to individual cases, and they will often directly compare the maximum available penalty for one type of offence against the offence category they are particularly interested in and say, ‘It cannot be right that we punish this offence more harshly’. That puts pressure on the government to respond.”
Writing for the Howard League for Penal Reform, five former senior judges indicated this could, in turn, help increase sentences for a range of other offences. “Part of the Sentencing Council’s role is to ensure a proportionate structure for sentencing, meaning that the increase in minimum sentences for one crime will necessarily have a knock-on effect across the board. The result has been ballooning sentences.”
A rise in violent and sexual offenders
The number of people in prison for violent crimes has shot up in recent years – especially since the end of 2022. One in three prisoners – 29,547 people – are now guilty of a violent offence in England and Wales, the highest figure since at least 2015. The number has risen by a fifth from December 2022 – and by nearly a third since the end of 2019, before the pandemic.
Sexual offenders make up the second largest group of prisoners (18%), which has also grown in the last few years. Between December 2017 and March 2021 the sexual offender population fell by more than 2,000 – but has since risen by 3,265 to a record 15,665.
Ministry of Justice officials have said early release rules will apply to serious and violent offenders, but only if they have served their time for those offences and are in jail on a consecutive but shorter sentence.
Counterintuitively, the increase in inmates has not been matched by a notable increase in violent or sexual offences. Figures from the Crime Survey for England and Wales show violent crime levels have remained broadly steady since the pandemic, having fallen for more than two decades prior. There was no significant increase in sexual assault between 2019 and 2023, though figures have crept up since 2014.
What has changed is better police recording of sexual and violent offences in the last decade, as well as an increased willingness of victims to come forward. Moreover, the Prison Reform Trust has said there is likely to be a general upward trend in the proportion of violent prisoners serving custodial sentences because they tend to be behind bars for longer. Until the first batch of longer sentences is served, and those prisoners released, their cohort will represent a larger and larger proportion of the total.
And the move to clear the backlog of cases piling up in courts since the Covid crisis has led to a general uptick in the number of people being imprisoned, according to the Prison Reform Trust.
An increase in prisoners on remand and recall
Another worrying trend is the rising number of people in prison on remand. These include some awaiting sentence, but also those awaiting trial who are, therefore, innocent in the eyes of the law.
There were more than 17,000 prisoners on remand in June this year, the highest level since at least June 2008. That figure is up 87% from 2019, and now represents almost one in every five prisoners in England and Wales. Experts have said the backlog in the courts has helped produce this mounting problem.
Simultaneously, there has been a large increase in people recalled to prison after being released on parole. There were 12,199 recall prisoners in June this year, compared with 7,435 before the pandemic and 5,260 in 2014 (when the probation service was partly privatised).
Penelope Gibbs, the director of the penal reform charity Transform Justice, said: “You have to look at the appetite for risk aversion in the probation service. There were some very serious offences committed by people who’d been released from prison under probation supervision. So the culture of probation has become more risk-averse.”
“No one wants to be the next front page in the newspaper about how someone who was on licence committed this awful thing under their watch,” added the Prison Reform Trust’s spokesperson.
He added that a major shift came in 2014, when the Conservative government made recall to prison possible on any sentence, not just the longer ones. That greatly increased the number of people liable to be returned to a jail cell, at the same time as pressure on probation service workers was also growing.
A backlog in the courts
The main reason for the sharp rise in prisoners on remand is long delays in the justice system.
Partly down to closures during the Covid crisis and the 2022 barristers’ strike, the court system in England and Wales has seen record decreases in case timeliness. The crown court has a record number of outstanding cases, more of which require a jury trial, so take even longer.
This backlog in the courts not only harms prison capacity, but also victims of crime. The longer justice is delayed, the more likely witnesses and victims are to forget details, and the more likely they are to withdraw from what can already be a stressful process.
And it may get yet worse. Responding to a report that crown court sitting days were to be capped this year at a level 2% lower than last, the chair of the Bar Council, Sam Townend KC, said last week: “The short-notice implementation of cuts in sitting days is causing real concern in courts up and down the country and will impact on victims, witnesses, and defendants.
“The government is right that the criminal justice system has been grossly underfunded for over a decade, more so than other public services. However, if we are to have any chance of reducing the court backlogs we need to restore the policy of uncapped sitting days.”
