British jails are now so bad that other countries are refusing to extradite criminals here on the grounds it would be “inhumane”. That may still come as a bit of a shock for a nation that, despite everything, has an entrenched habit of considering itself the gold standard.
But of course we are not, at least when it comes to prisons. Here are just a few more details from a recent report that compiled testimonies from officers: rooms flooded with “the smell of urine from rodents”; broken CCTV cameras; floors breaking down into trip hazards; “ongoing legionella issues”; kitchens with no heating for eight years; a jail that has been without hot water since April 2022. Things have got so bad that some prisons are commissioning inmates to do the repairs themselves.
Part of the problem is privatised maintenance, which the Prison Officers Association report criticises. In 2015, this was outsourced. A recent National Audit Office report found that a quarter of prison places don’t meet basic fire safety standards, and that the backlog of maintenance works has doubled in the last four years. It has estimated that sorting all this out will cost £2.8bn over five years. But this is not the only reason prisons are in such a state.
It all started with a steep increase in the prison population – now far higher than other countries in western Europe. Stiffer maximum sentences, rising prosecutions and swelling numbers of people on remand means that in over three decades the population doubled to 86,000, and is now set to reach 100,000 by 2029. Since September, thousands of inmates have been set free early, which has held off a crisis. But only temporarily. By July, critical capacity will probably be reached again.
More prisoners has led to overcrowding, as spending on space and officers has not kept up. Inmates are jammed into cells meant for one. When there are too many people in prison, it is harder to manage them, and engage them in activities that lead to rehabilitation. Instead of exercising, studying, working or training, about four in 10 prisoners spend nearly all day locked up, rattling around their cells, bored. Boredom leads to self-harm, drug use and violence. Violence is then exacerbated by the staff shortage, which means it can rapidly get out of control. Between 2020 and 2023, the number of prisoners attacking each other grew by 57%. Assaults on staff are now higher than at any point before 2015.
This exacerbates the problem – it means fewer people want to work in prisons in the first place, and current officers leave. Last week it was reported that one guard gave up his 20-year career after being kicked and stamped on by an inmate. There has been a recent exodus of the most seasoned prison officers: in 2017, there were 11,100 guards with more than a decade’s experience. That has fallen to
just 6,681. One in four new recruits leave within a year. A survey suggests that things will get worse still: half of prison officers do not feel safe at work and about 40% plan to leave the service in the next five years.
When prisons are desperate for recruits, standards go down. Officers now arrive after just a few weeks of training, often done online. And when staff are underprepared or unsuited to the work they are doing, things get grimmer still. A report last week found that four in 10 prisoners who took their own lives in custody were denied proper healthcare. One man, jailed for shoplifting, pleaded for help and did not eat or sleep in the days leading up to his death, but was not seen by a mental health clinician. Relatives described his treatment as “medieval”.
And then there’s a final twist: hellish, violent jails make inmates less fit for the outside world. Reoffending goes up, and yet more people get shovelled into the prison system. The vicious cycle starts again.
What’s the solution to all this? The most obvious way to shrink the prison population is to reduce the length of sentences. There is no point giving criminals longer time in jail if they spend it acquiring more violent habits and becoming mentally unwell. But this will be hard for Labour to do. Politicians believe that any signs of being soft on crime will be punished by voters. They are not wrong to be worried – when asked, the public tend to say that sentencing is too lenient.
But politicians may underestimate the space for persuasion. It turns out that the view we should be tougher on crime is mainly reserved for violence, and, say, death by dangerous driving. Fewer feel the same about theft, or drug dealing. Giving people more details about sentencing guidelines tends to soften this stance further. Presented with examples and case studies, the public are more inclined to think judgments are not too lenient, after all. We are also keen on the idea of rehabilitation.
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Perhaps the government should try something novel when it comes to dealing with the prison problem: treat the public as if they are capable of nuanced thinking. The art of persuasion has gone out of fashion in politics, but there is a clear case to be made for shortening some sentences. It could and should be made.
One tactic might be to talk about how much we are paying for all this. The average cost of a prison place in 2022-2023 was £52,000. Another would be to highlight the dangers of unrehabilitated prisoners roaming the streets, ready to reoffend. The Netherlands has managed to cut prison numbers dramatically, while keeping crime low. There is just a chance we could do the same.
