Prison capacity will run out again in early 2026, according to Ministry of Justice (MoJ) forecasts, despite the recent early release of thousands of prisoners from the summer of 2024, warns a report by the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) of members of Parliament. The MoJ and HM Prison and Probation Service’s (HMPPS’s) failure to increase prison capacity in line with demand has led to a prison estate in crisis, say MPs; the the adult male prison estate ‘remains alarmingly full’. The ‘prison capacity crisis risks undermining the safety and security of prisons’, the report states.
Greater crowding is linked to higher rates of violence and self–harm–the rate of assaults, such as fights between prisoners and attacks on staff, increased significantly in the year to September 2024, according to the report.
What they say
The Cotswolds Conservative Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown, chair of the Committee, said: “This Committee recognises and respects the extraordinary work carried out by prison staff. This work is often done in the most difficult circumstances, even when the system is working at optimal efficiency. But our inquiry has established that severely overcrowded prisons are in danger of becoming pressure cookers. Vital rehabilitative work providing purposeful activity including retraining would help to cut high rates of reoffending – but this work is sidelined as staff are forced to focus on maintaining control of increasingly unsafe environments. Many prisoners themselves are living in simply inhumane conditions, with their health needs often overlooked.
“As with our recent inquiry into court backlogs, we find a Department grappling with the fall-out of problems it should have predicted, while awaiting the judgment of an external review before taking any truly radical corrective action. Lives are being put at increasing risk by the Government’s historic failures to increase capacity. Despite the recent emergency release of thousands of prisoners, the system still faces total gridlock in a matter of months. It is now for the Government to act on the recommendations in our report if disaster is to be averted.”
The committee in its report noted the connections in the criminal justice system; ‘creating sufficient capacity in prisons is vital to enabling a reduction in the courts backlog, and in turn if the courts backlog is reduced this will decrease the number of people on remand’. When taking evidence, MPs heard from the Prison Service that airport–style security to stop people bringing contraband into prisons, so as to make prisons safer, ‘was challenging even before it was running the estate at 99 per cent occupancy’.
Background
As the MPs were told in written evidence, the prison estate is under severe pressure with a January 2024 population of 87,538 prisoners; that population is set to rise to at least 94,600 by March 2028. Under ‘recruitment and retention challenges’ faced by prisons, some 3,149 prison officers left the service by the end of September 2024, and abaout a third, 34pc (1,064) left within their first year. The prisoner-to-prison-officer ratio of 4:1 is double the European average.
Photo by Mark Rowe: Shrewsbury Prison wall.
