The prison population boom has put our justice system at a crisis point

Overcrowding is making our prisons and our communities less safe, writes chief prisons inspector Charlie Taylor. We need to have a national conversation about who we lock up, and for how long

In the last few years, the number of remanded prisoners has risen to 18 per cent of the total population (iStock/Getty)

At almost 89,000, our prison population is now the largest it has ever been. There’s a serious risk that we will soon run out of space. This crisis has prompted ministers to bring in an early release scheme to let some prisoners out up to 18 days early and a new presumption against sentences of under 12 months,

In the last two years, two new prisons have opened in the East Midlands and another is being built in Yorkshire, providing another 5,000 spaces. The Ministry of Justice is even looking at buying prison places abroad to house the growing number of men who are ending up in jail.

Whether these measures are enough to accommodate the growing population is unclear. Projections from the prison service suggest that the population will top 100,000 by the end of the decade. This should not come as a surprise. This was predicted as far back as 2018, and had it not been for the slowdown during the pandemic, we may have reached this state even sooner.

In the last few years, the number of remanded prisoners has risen to 18 per cent of the total population. It is not unusual to come across inmates who have been waiting up to three years for their trials – in one prison I visited, one in 10 remanded prisoners had been there for over a year.

Stuck in limbo while they wait for the courts to grind through Covid backlogs, these prisoners do not get the same level of support as their sentenced peers. Worryingly, some have been on remand for so long, that even if they are found guilty, they are released straight from court because of the time they have already served. They are not even entitled to the standard £89.52 discharge grant, and they will have had no support with finding housing or work.

Some of these are risky men, and their victims or the police may have no idea that they are coming back into the community – a particular worry when they have been convicted of domestic abuse or stalking offences.

Increases in sentence length have been the other cause of prison population growth – in the last 10 years, the average sentence has gone from 14.5 to 21.4 months, while those handed down for serious offences have risen from around 3 and a half to just over five years. Older governors tell me that in the 1990s it was unusual to come across prisoners serving more than four years; now we have whole jails that are full of them. Finding ways to stop these men from descending into despair or prison-based crime has become an ongoing challenge for the prison service.

The biggest pressure of all has been on the inner-city Victorian local prisons of which Bedford is one of the worst, with cramped, damp, mouldy, cockroach-infested cells in which most prisoners spend 22 hours a day locked up. Many are addicted to drugs, which flow freely into the prison, and mental illness is endemic. Tragically, a prisoner there told me that he felt safer in the prison than he did on the outside. It is hard to imagine how bad things must be if you start thinking of Bedford jail as home.

In the next two years, we might be able to get by without our prisons overflowing, but in the longer term we need to have a national conversation about who we lock up; for how long; what we want prisoners to do while they are inside; and what we want them to do when they come out. If not, the cycle of human misery will continue, with more victims of crime and more lives wasted away behind bars.

Charlie Taylor is the chief prisons inspector