Prisoners being held in decaying, short-staffed prisons with poor resettlement support are being set-up to fail.
The claim comes as part of our written evidence to the House of Commons Justice Committee. The Committee is currently undertaking an Inquiry into prison rehabilitation and resettlement.
The prison system is currently wrestling with a record backlog in essential maintenance. The value of essential repairs is now estimated at £1.8 billion, double the figure just four years ago.
Only last week, the Ministry of Justice’s top civil servant, Dame Antonia Romeo, admitted to MPs that the prison service is “going to need a lot more money in the next spending round to begin to make inroads into the maintenance”.
The situation has left prison governors in an impossible situation. As the Prisons Inspectorate noted in 2023:
Governors said they worried about how they could create a rehabilitative culture when they could not even repair floors and showers. For example, overcrowded living conditions coupled with a lack of investment in the fabric of ageing buildings in need of repair made it harder to motivate prisoners to behave
Also in our evidence, we point to increased probation service workloads caused by staff shortages, and a lack of support for released prisoners in relation to housing, employment and substance misuse support. And we raise concerns about the inappropriate use of recall.
Read our full evidence to the Justice Committee in html or pdf formats, or download it from this page.
