‘PRISON POPULATION EXPLOSION’

The Prison Reform Trust is warning that the new Criminal Justice Bill, being debated in the Commons today, will lead to the prison population topping 100,000 by the end of the decade.

The new legislation will result in much longer sentences that will significantly increase  prison numbers. In recent years ever lengthening sentences have resulted in the prison population reaching a new record. It currently stands at  72,971, an increase of more than two thousand in the last year.

According to Home Office figures 90 out of the 138 prisons in England and Wales are now overcrowded. The top ten most overcrowded jails are:

Preston, Usk, Leicester, Shrewsbury, Exeter, Altcourse, Dorchester, Swansea, Canterbury, Lacaster

Prison overcrowding has resulted in an alarming increase in the number of suicides.  Last year there were 94 deaths by suicide in prison custody, compared to 72 in 2001. Since January more than 40 prisoners have killed themselves.

Educational activities and offending behaviour programmes are being cut back. More than 17,000 prisoners are having to double up in cells designed for one person.

The Director of the Prison Reform Trust, Juliet Lyon, said:

‘The prison population is already close to its bust limit. To promote a Bill with a raft of inflationary measures at a time when the crime rate is falling is at best irresponsible and at worst dangerous. We want our jails to work effectively to prevent re-offending, not simply to become warehouses for offenders.

For most crimes, tough new community penalties now exist. It would be far better to use tax-payers money to further develop options such as Drug Treatment and Testing Orders, Curfew Orders backed with electronic monitoring and the Prolific Offender Programmes jointly managed by police and probation.”
 

NOTES TO EDITORS

1. The UK now has  the highest imprisonment rate in the European Union at 139 per 100,000, taking over from Portugal which has an imprisonment rate of 131 per 100,000.

2. The number of prisoners in England and Wales has increased by over 25,000 in the last ten years.  In 1993, the average prison population was 44,566.  When Labour came to Government in May 1997 the prison population was 60,131.  This continued to increase, and stood at 66,105 when David Blunkett became Home Secretary on 8 June 2001.

3. The number of women in prison has increased particularly dramatically.  Ten years ago in 1993 the average female prison population was 1,560.  Five years ago in 1998 it stood at 3,105 .  On  May  16 2003, there were 4437 women in prison, an increase of  more than 150 per cent)

4. Since 1996, over 18,500 additional prison places have been provided at a cost of more than £1.5 billion – an average of £100,000 a prison place.

5. Prison has a poor record in reducing re-offending – 59 per cent  of prisoners are reconvicted within 2 years of being released. The reconviction rate for male young adults (under 21 )over the same period is 74 per cent.  For prisoners who are sentenced for burglary, one of the most common offences, the reconviction rate is about 75 per cent.

6.  The Social Exclusion Unit has concluded that re-offending by ex-prisoners costs society at least £11 billion per year. Ex-prisoners are responsible for about one in five of all recorded crimes.

7. Since 1996, over 18,500 additional prison places have been provided at a cost of more than £1.5 billion – an average of £100,000 a prison place.

8. Building new prisons has not been a solution to prison overcrowding.  In the last ten years 13 new prisons have been opened.  Of these, 9 were overcrowded at the end of April.

9. The number of life sentence prisoners has increased considerably in recent years.  There were 5,352 prisoners serving life sentences in February 2003.  This compares with less than 4,000 in 1998 and 3,000 in 1992. England and Wales has a higher proportion of  life sentence prisoners than the whole of Western Europe combined.

10. The number of prisoners serving short sentences has also increased. Between 1991 and 2001 the number of adult prisoners sentenced to 12 months or less more than doubled from over 22,000 to more than 49,000. In 2001 there were more than 10,000 prisoners serving sentences of 12 months or less.

11. Home Office research highlighted in the Halliday report (Making Punishments Work, July 2001) indicates that  it would take around a 15 per cent increase in the prison population to result in a short term reduction of crime of just one per cent.