Too many prisons, too little sense

This is the latest in a long line of official reports on prisons, imprisonment and related matters in England and Wales stretching back over the last three decades from the Woolf Report of 1991, which was commissioned by the government of the day following a major riot in Strangeways Prison in April 1990.

The report, written by Lord Justice Woolf, as he then was, assisted by Judge Stephen Tumim, HM Chief Inspector of Prisons, was widely welcomed at the time.

The Report made 12 main recommendations and all but one were accepted by the government. The government’s subsequent response in the Criminal Justice Act 1991 served to create a sense of anticipation that a period of genuine penal reform might be about to begin.

Sadly, that optimism was short lived.

Since the Woolf Report we have had, among others:

• The Howard League Commission on English Prisons Today’s Do Better: Do Less (2009);
• The British Academy’s A presumption against imprisonment: Social values and social order (2014);
• The Howard League’s Judicial Critique on Sentence Inflation (2024);
• The House of Lords Justice and Home Affairs Committee on Prison Management (2025).

Relentless prison growth

These are all carefully argued reports and some led to short term improvements, but overall they have resulted in little radical change. The leitmotif of all of them has been a continuing concern about the incessant increase in the number of men and women being held in prisons in England and Wales.

The single recommendation in the Woolf Report which the government did not accept was that “no establishment should hold more prisoners than is provided for in its certified normal level of accommodation”. An indirect consequence of that decision, whether intended or not, is to be found in the relevant imprisonment figures for subsequent years:

• 1990: 45,000
• 2000: 64,000
• 2010: 84,000
• 2020: 79,500
• 2022: 80,500
• 2025: 88,000

These increases cannot be accounted for by any parallel increase in levels of recorded crime. The 2024 Howard League report, written by five of the most senior former judges in England and Wales, commented:

Over the half-century that we have been involved in the law, custodial sentence lengths have approximately doubled and the same is true of prison numbers... There is nothing that justifies this doubling of sentence lengths...

Contrary to public perception, the Office of National Statistics (ONS) crime survey data for England and Wales indicates a long-term decline in common types of crime since the 1990s… There is little evidence that increased use of longer prison sentences has contributed to falling crime rates.

The Gauke Review also draws attention to this fact.

When the prison population fell

There is one outlier in the above statistics: in the decade between 2010 and 2020 the prison population fell by 4,500. This reduction was not driven by yet another official inquiry or report, nor by any major change in legislation. Instead, it can be attributed in great part to the determination of one man: Kenneth Clarke, who was appointed Secretary of State for Justice, with overall responsibility for prisons in England and Wales in the incoming Conservative government.

As Home Secretary in the early 1990s Clarke had responsibility for prisons and he was again given that portfolio when his party returned to government in 2010. On taking up his latter appointment he asked an enchantingly disingenuous question.

When I was last responsible for prisons in 1993 there were 45,000 people in prison; I now find that there are 84,000 people in prison. What on earth has happened?

In common with all good lawyers, Clarke was well aware that he should never ask a question to which he did not already know the answer. In this case he did indeed know the answer and, having sown the seed of doubt with his innocent question, he went on in succeeding months to make clear what he thought the answer should be.

Of course, as a government Minister he had no direct say in which particular individuals should or should not be sent to prison but he was key in fostering a climate among the judiciary which was much more rigorous when it came to deciding when an individual needed to be sent to prison. At the outset he announced his intention to look critically at the way in which courts were imposing short prison sentences. He also went on to announce his determination, among other things, to ensure that people with serious mental illness and drug and alcohol addictions would in future be diverted from imprisonment towards hospital and treatment centres in the community.

In announcing his priorities for action the Minister was identifying some of the drivers in the increase in the number of people being sent to prison and the evidence indicates that this message was taken on board by those who, directly or indirectly, had a part to play in deciding who should or should not be imprisoned.

Within a very short time, as frequently happens with government ministers, Clarke was moved from his portfolio before he could embed lasting change. His successor had an entirely different perspective on these matters and in short measure there had been a return to the status quo ante.

The Gauke Review offers some useful international examples, which it suggests might be helpful when considering potential positive change in England and Wales. In respect of the United States it draws attention to the use of ‘good time’ to reduce the length of sentences served in the State of Texas.

However, in discussion of these comparisons in the course of her recent presentation at the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies Michele Deitch of the University of Texas at Austin cautioned against too much stress on the example of Texas and referred instead to a number of other states where there had been more radical initiatives.

Reinvesting prison spending into communities

One of these was Connecticut, which in the early 2000s had to cope with rising prison numbers at a time when the State’s overall budget provision was diminishing. As an alternative to new prison building, state officials chose to experiment with a model that reduced the prison population substantially over two years while at the same time reducing crime rates.

They began by analysing data about prison growth and the locations where people in prison came from and to which they would return.

The research uncovered a significant fact: half the prison population in the State came from a few neighbourhoods in three cities, including one where a single neighbourhood was costing the state $20 million a year in prison and probation costs.

By examining not only criminal justice data but also social services data, the study found that many of the people returning from prison lived in neighbourhoods where a disproportionate number of people received unemployment insurance and where many families received special welfare payments. (These findings resonate with research carried out in Scotland around the same time which found that half of that country’s prison population came from just 155 of the country’s 1,222 local government wards, with one quarter belonging to only 53 wards, most of which were in deprived areas of Glasgow).

In Connecticut the publication of these and similar findings led to a growing political consensus about the need to withstand the pressure to provide more prison places and instead to invest the savings in local community projects. The State halted plans to build additional prisons and was able to reduce the annual prisons’ budget substantially. It reinvested much of the savings in the relevant neighbourhoods to support community planning processes, to increase the capacity of the local mental health and addiction services to provide more community outreach and treatment, to new community programmes that focused on transition from prison to home and to the employment of additional probation officers to reduce the size of individual caseloads.

As a consequence, the State of Connecticut went from having one of the fastest growing prison systems in the country to having one which was significantly reduced in size.

If similar initiatives were to be implemented in the United Kingdom, they would inevitably have implications for other public agencies. For example, in recent years demands on police services have expanded into areas which are beyond their traditional remit.

In 2014 the Chief Constable of South Yorkshire reported that his officers spent just 25 per cent of their time investigating crime while almost half of their work related to ‘things other agencies are increasingly ¬moving away from because of their own budget cuts’. This assertion was backed up in an analysis by the College of Policing in 2015 which found that non-crime related incidents accounted for 83 per cent of all calls to police Command and Control Centres; while the Metropolitan Police estimated that 15 to 20 per cent of incidents reported to police in London were linked to mental health.

Examples such as these reinforce the argument for a deeper systemic reform which goes far beyond the prison system, one which will recognise that a resolution of many of the underlying issues of public safety and wellbeing cannot be found within the justice system alone, far less by an ever increasing use of imprisonment.

Rather, they will have to engage many other institutions in civil society. In a word, as well as responding to criminal activity after it has occurred, we need to focus on enhancing communities and on creating strong local environments which will reduce the likelihood of crime and anti-social behaviour occurring in the first place.