During the times of maximum crisis in UK prison capacity, ‘the recognition that prisons were close to capacity temporarily affected the way that the courts and police behaved’, according to the Independent Prison Capacity Review, led by Dame Anne Owers.
The report put the crisis, from 2022 on, down to ‘greater use of custody, an escalation in the length of sentences for more serious offences, and increases in the proportion of time spent in custody’; and a significant rise in the number of those recalled to prison, who accounted for nearly a quarter of prison admissions in 2023-24. Nearly one in five prisoners are also remanded or unsentenced, due to the continuing backlog in the criminal courts.
On occasion the system has been within days of collapse, the report found; ‘senior officials struggled daily with the effort to keep the system
running’, which included those running prison escort services, transporting people to and from courts and prisons.
As for the Government seeking to build more prisons and add to the number of places for prisoners, the report pointed to ‘financial pressures and planning constraints’, with the need to ensure appropriate levels of security, that have severely limited the ability to create new prison places, or even to replace old crumbling prisons with new and more efficient ones.
Under Conservatives and Labour, letting out prisoners once they have served 40 per cent of their sentence ‘provided breathing space, but not a solution’, the report went on. “By the spring of 2025, prison numbers were once again butting up against capacity, police cells were again being used, and the forums set up to manage capacity were revived. Emergency action to expand the use of fixed-term recalls has been announced, and home detention curfew (‘tagging’) has been further extended.” The report quoted the Independent Sentencing Review, by David Gawke, published in May, specifically its aim to cap the projected rise in prison numbers at its highest ever level of around 95,000. Owers wrote: “That will still be a challenge for the prison service. Meanwhile, early release measures and greater use of community alternatives do not by themselves reduce overall pressure: they displace it,” such as from prisons to probation.
Owers called for ‘a change of approach from predicting to preventing crises, both in prisons and probation and community services’. She pointed to the Boris Johnson era of 20,000 new police officers between 2020 and 2023, and said that it ‘was inevitably going to have an impact on the courts and the prison system. It would be a slow burn: those officers would need to be recruited and trained, and would not be fully effective
immediately. That should not have stopped planning for its eventual impact, and indeed provided time for planning to be effective. But because projections overestimated the immediate impact, this became a reason or excuse for inaction, rather than an opportunity for early action. This should have included not just building prisons, but investing in probation and community services to manage and support those arrested and convicted.’
The report looked at a MoJ (Ministry of Justice) review of options which included using prison ships; and ‘examining whether any other accommodation such as care homes, community centres, abandoned RAF bases or youth hostels could be designated as prisons, or whether prisoners could be housed in tents or static caravans. None of these options proved viable, and in most cases the security levels they would provide meant that they would only be suitable for low-risk prisoners’.
POA view
Meanwhile at the prison officers’ union the POA, Steve Gillan, General Secretary, has described assaults on prison staff as ‘completely intolerable’. He said: “In no other workplace would such levels of violence against staff who in the course of their duties be tolerated.”
Photo by Mark Rowe: Shrewsbury Prison wall.
