April 3

April 3, 2003: Prison System in Crisis, Says PRT

The Prison Reform Trust (PRT) today released the Bromley briefing prison factfile, showing a system under enormous pressure and a looming overcrowding crisis. The briefing, available for download on the PRT website, charts ten years of longer sentences, the growing imprisonment of women, young people, petty offenders, the over-use of remand and recall and the extra-ordinary prevalence of drug and alcohol dependence and mental illness in prison: all coupled with the growing failure of pressured prisons to cut re-offending. In the introduction Prison Reform Trust director Juliet Lyon stated:

“These facts and figures about the state of our prisons must act as a wake up call to a Government pre-occupied with other things. Prisons should be places that hold securely, and make every effort to rehabilitate, serious and violent offenders. The skills and focus of those who run them should be wholly directed towards that aim, in the interests of public safety. Instead, rapidly rising numbers have reduced many prisons to locked warehouses in which prison officers are called upon to act simply as turnkeys, processing people in transit from overcrowded jail to overcrowded jail.”

Prison numbers have again crossed the 77,000 barrier. The Home Secretary, in his speech to the Prison Reform Trust last year, emphasised the need to reduce prisoners’ re-offending by improving their employability, treating drug and alcohol addiction and maintaining family links via a new network of community prisons. Overcrowding hazards all of these ambitions.

During the period where the population has grown, and overcrowding has become endemic, prison’s crime-stopping record has worsened dramatically. In 1992 the reconviction rate was 51%, the most recent figure, released by the Home Office, reveals that two in three people, 67%, re-offend within two years of release from prison. On 24 March 2006, the prison population in England and Wales stood at 77,004, a rise of 2,603 on the year before.

The number of prisoners in England and Wales has increased by over 25,000 in the last ten years. In 1995, the average prison population was 50,962. When Labour came to power in May 1997, the prison population was 60,131. Previously, it took nearly four decades (1958-1995) for the prison population to rise by 25,000. England and Wales has the highest imprisonment rate in western Europe at 143 per 100,000 of the population. France has an imprisonment rate of 88 per 100,000 and Germany has a rate of 97 per 100,000.

The number of women in prison has more than doubled over the past decade. On 24 March 2006, the women’s prison population stood at 4,392. Ten years ago in 1995, the average female prison population was 1,998. Five years ago it stood at 3,355. In 2003, 13,000 women were received into prison. Home Office research has found that 66% of women prisoners are mothers, and each year it is estimated that more than 17,700 children are separated from their mother by imprisonment. On 24 March 2006 there were 11,200 people under 21 years old in prisons in England and Wales. Of these, more than 2,603 were children under 18. The number of children in prison has nearly doubled in the last ten years.

Juliet Lyon commented:

“No one can be satisfied with a prison system which turns people out more, not less, likely to offend again. Overcrowded prisons are turning petty criminals into the old lags of the future. Government has neither the time, nor the money, to build its way out of this looming prison crisis but it does have ready solutions to hand to resurrect fines, enforce work and community payback, divert addicts into treatment and the mentally ill into healthcare. It must act now to increase public and judicial confidence in effective alternatives to custody.”

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