We’ve heard a lot about prisons in recent months; specifically, the fact that they were full when the new government took office last summer. Labour introduced emergency measures to release thousands of prisoners early, which eased the immediate pressure. The government has committed to building four new prisons as well as adding blocks to existing prisons, creating 14,000 new prison spaces over the next seven years. But when the prison system gets bigger, so do the problems within it. And none of this answers the more complicated question of what happens next.
So far, we have seen sticking-plaster solutions to a systemic crisis that has been created, in no small part, by the desire of successive governments to appear tough on crime. Any serious attempt to turn things around requires consideration of how we got here. The UK’s prison population is at record levels; it has almost doubled in the past 30 years. England and Wales have the highest per capita prison population in western Europe, and in the wider continent, only Russia and Turkey jail more people. Amid endemic overcrowding and understaffing, conditions are often poor, with inmates routinely confined to their cells – usually shared – for 23 hours a day. The suicide rate in our jails is twice the European average. Waiting lists for rehabilitative work – behaviour courses, education, training – are so long that some inmates might never access them at all. Most people would probably agree that none of this is desirable; it certainly doesn’t do much to lower the crime rate.
So how has this situation come about? The crucial issue is sentence inflation. In short, over the past 20 years, more people have been handed prison sentences, and they have got longer and longer over time, despite no corresponding increase in crime. In 2023, the average custodial sentence given at crown court was 25% longer than in 2012. This isn’t solely a case of more serious offences being tried – it’s also true that longer sentences are being handed out for the same crime. Sentences for robbery, for example, were 13 months longer on average in 2023 than in 2012, an increase of 36%.
These longer sentences kept the prison population flat over the 2010s, despite falling numbers of people being tried and convicted for crimes overall. In September 2024, the Howard League (which advocates for penal reform) published a paper by five senior former judges, calling for an “an honest conversation about what custodial sentences can and cannot achieve” and a return to “more modest proportionate sentences across the board”. The judges wrote that in the 50 years they’d been involved with the law, sentence lengths had doubled and so had the prison population, and called for a reversal of this trend.
There was no single moment where sentences became longer; it has been a slow creep, the result of decades of small changes to the law. But one crucial turning point was the Blair government’s 2003 Criminal Justice Act, which introduced statutory starting points for minimum terms for murder. The change was implemented only in England and Wales, where sentences for serious offences have risen much faster than in Scotland, demonstrating how one seemingly small legislative change can have a cascade of consequences. When sentences are made longer, or minimum terms are introduced for one crime, it can lead to calls for similar conditions on other crimes. More recently, the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022 increased the maximum sentence for death by dangerous driving from 14 years to life imprisonment, while other legislation has increased minimum sentences for crimes such as firearms offences and domestic burglary. Emotive campaigns by victims or pressure groups to create new offences or lengthen sentences to address specific issues or problems can have a similar effect.
Imposing longer sentences for specific crimes can feel intuitively like a satisfying and fair solution to specific instances of injustice. But a prison system already swollen by years of successive sentencing increases was not in a position to accommodate new, successive crises. Over the past decade and a half, austerity has meant drastic cuts to the probation service and court systems. Since 2017, the number of people being recalled to prison after being released on probation has gone up 85%. Massive crown court backlogs have led to more people being held on remand awaiting trial – an 84% increase since 2019 (with two-thirds of those people yet to be convicted of a crime).
For too long, the emphasis, by successive governments, has been on sending people to prison without much thought for what happens while they are there. Equally little consideration is given to what is actually effective. In 2022, the Sentencing Council concluded that there was no strong evidence that severe sentences deter people from committing crime.
Could this approach change? There are some glimmers of hope. Alongside the push to expand prison places, the government is conducting an independent review of sentencing policy, due to report in the spring. It’s expected to recommend that more people are given community orders or suspended sentences – meaning that they are served outside prison. This is a way to ease pressure on prison spaces, but it might also prove effective; at present, offenders given noncustodial sentences have lower levels of recidivism, perhaps because it is easier to access support and rehabilitation outside prison than inside.
If we actually want to reduce crime, we might shift from looking at the length of sentences to what people are doing while serving them – and instead of judging criminal justice policies on whether they sound “tough” or “soft” on crime, considering whether they work.
