25/11/2021 13:00:00
Commenting on the publication of today’s (25 November) prison population projections by the Ministry of Justice, Peter Dawson, director of the Prison Reform Trust said:
“The latest projection for the prison population will be portrayed by ministers as a policy success, with more criminals brought to justice. But the detail actually contains multiple admissions of failure. The government is recruiting 23,400 police officers but has no idea whether their time is to be spent preventing crime or chasing after it. Action to reduce reoffending is promised but apparently will have no impact. A strategy to reduce the imprisonment of women will fail so completely that the female prison population will grow by over a third. Inadequate support in the community for people on indeterminate sentences will mean that even more are being needlessly recalled to prison. By 2025, around 30% of our prison population will be over 50 years old, when the peak age for offending is people in their late twenties.
“The price of all these failures is an extra 18,000 people in prison by 2025, costing us all an additional £800m every year, not to mention the £4bn already put aside to build the cells to house them. Exactly why, uniquely in western Europe, we need to lock up so many of our fellow citizens, is never explained. It’s a foolish waste of scarce resources, driven by politics, not evidence.”
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05/07/2021 00:01:00
Prisoner numbers in England and Wales are projected to rise by one quarter (20,000) over the next five years. But there are no plans either to reduce overcrowding or close prisons that are clearly unfit for purpose. Efforts by the prison service to recover from the impact of the global pandemic will be fatally undermined as a result, according to a new report published today (5 July 2021) by the Prison Reform Trust.
The report, Prison: the facts, highlights Ministry of Justice prison population projections that predict a rise to 98,700 people from the current level of 77,912 (4 June 2021) by 2026. This is due to the impact of inflationary sentencing policies, including proposals in the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts (PCSC) Bill currently before Parliament, the recruitment of 20,000 police officers, which is expected to increase charge volumes, and the recovery of the courts as Covid-19 restrictions subside.
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29/06/2020 11:30:00
Commenting on the re-announcement that four new prisons are to be built in the next six years, Peter Dawson, director of the Prison Reform Trust said:
"These prisons have already been announced, and fruitless work has been underway to 'identify locations' for new prisons since 2012. But rehashing this tired old announcement as part of a plan for economic recovery is not only poor politics. It’s poor policymaking when the government’s punitive sentencing policies mean that, if they are ever built, these places will be quickly filled and nothing in the rest of the prison estate will change.
"The Public Accounts Committee is taking evidence on a report from the National Audit Office that laid bare the total absence of a coherent plan for prisons. Nothing has changed. An effective prison strategy has to manage demand as well as supply. It must reduce the numbers needlessly in custody. Only then can the government close the crumbling establishments and end the overcrowded conditions which shame us as a country."
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07/02/2020 00:01:00
Commenting on the findings of today’s (7 February) National Audit Office report on improving the prison estate, Peter Dawson, director of the Prison Reform Trust said:
“This startlingly frank report says that the government is failing to provide safe, secure and decent prisons. It describes in forensic detail how a succession of plans have disintegrated almost as soon as they have been announced, resulting in a failure to build new prisons, or close old ones, or maintain the current prison estate in a useable condition. To cap it all, there is no plan in place for the future.
“Scarcely a week passes without another high profile announcement of longer sentences or delayed release dates, despite the absence of any evidence that more imprisonment does anything to deter or reduce crime. This report exposes the recklessness of that approach, sending people to a prison system that shames us as a country, and all too often serves only to entrench the behaviour it is supposed to change.”
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31/10/2019 00:01:00
Commenting on today's (31 October) report on prison governance published by the House of Commons Justice Committee, Peter Dawson, director of the Prison Reform Trust said:
"This report is a scathing indictment of a political failure. The Government doesn't hesitate to promise more jail time for more people, but it has no plan for how to deliver a decent, safe or effective prison system to accommodate them.
"People's lives and public safety are at stake, and making 'policy by press notice' isn't good enough. The people who live and work in prison deserve to be told when overcrowding will end, and dilapidated prisons finally be shut."
Photo credit: Andy Aitchison
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16/09/2019 14:50:00
Following the Prime Minister’s announcements about prisons in mid-August, we wrote three letters seeking clarification, to Permanent Secretary Richard Heaton, to the Secretary of State, Robert Buckland and to the CEO of HMPPS, Jo Farrar. To their collective credit, they have replied only three weeks later, and with some detail.
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Photo credit: Andy Aitchison
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24/06/2019 00:01:00
There were more than 140,000 admissions into prison in England and Wales in 2017—the highest number in western Europe, according to a new report published today (24 June 2019) by the Prison Reform Trust.
The report Prison: the facts, reveals that, despite the number falling in recent years, England and Wales still have over 40,000 more admissions to prison than Germany, the second-highest—which has a significantly larger national population.
The rate of prison admissions, which accounts for the effects of differences in national populations, shows that England and Wales have a rate approximately three times that of Italy and Spain, and almost twice as high as Germany, with 238 prison admissions for every 100,000 people.
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Photo credit: Andy Aitchison
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