The government has opened a first-of-its-kind “green” prison that will add 1,500 places to the bursting prison estate in England and Wales.
HMP Millsike in East Yorkshire, described by critics as a “megaprison”, will be one of Britain’s biggest jails and is the first of four to be built as part of a programme to create 14,000 extra prison places by 2031.
The all-electric site, with solar panels and heat pump technology, has been built next to the maximum security HMP Full Sutton, which houses nearly 600 category A and B male prisoners. About 600 jobs have been created, according to the Ministry of Justice.
This extra capacity, the government said, “will help put more violent offenders behind bars, make streets safer and ensure the country never runs out of cells again”.
The opening follows months of prisoners being released early, some after serving just 40% of their sentence, to create space for those entering the system.
Most prisons in England and Wales are overcrowded, with some at nearly twice their capacity, a situation described by the Howard League for Penal Reform in March as “beyond full”.
It comes as the Justice secretary, Shabana Mahmood, has re-enacted the use of police cells to hold prisoners after jail occupancy reached a six-month high.
Mahmood said: “This government is fixing the broken prison system we inherited, delivering the cells needed to take the most dangerous criminals off our streets. HMP Millsike sets the standard for the jails of the future, with cutting crime built into its very fabric.
“But building jails only takes us so far in ending this crisis, which is why we’re also reviewing sentencing so we can always lock up dangerous offenders and make our streets safer.”
Official figures show the backlog in the crown court system has reached 74,651 cases and could rise to 100,000 cases by the end of 2029. The government said the figures revealed “the scale of the crisis we inherited in our courts”.
Earlier this year, interim findings of a review led by the former justice secretary David Gauke found the prison population crisis was caused by a desire by successive governments to appear “tough on crime”, despite evidence that harsh prison sentences do not reduce crime.
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Millsike is part of the government’s £2.3bn 10-year prison capacity strategy published in December, which includes 6,400 places through new houseblocks in existing prisons and 6,500 places created by building new prisons.
Earlier this month, the government announced the completion of an expansion of HMP Highpoint in Suffolk, which will boost its capacity by more than 50% and make it the largest prison in the UK, with the capacity to hold more than 2,000 prisoners.
HMP Millsike will have 24 workshops and training facilities, which the government said were aimed at rehabilitating offenders, and will be run by the contractor Mitie Care and Custody, with education and training run by PeoplePlus.
Mitie Care and Custody’s managing director, Russell Trent, said: “As a resettlement prison, our focus is on rehabilitation and restoration centred on future orientation to break the cycle of reoffending.”
