Prison Overcrowding

What is prison overcrowding?

The British prison population has been increasing rapidly in recent years, and the prison estate has struggled to keep up with the rising demand.

As prisons are expensive and take a long time to build, the result of a lack of capacity has been overcrowding, which is when prisons have to house more inmates than they are designed for.

Overcrowding may be attributed to a number of factors, including failure to find and use effective alternatives to prison, under-funding of prison building programmes, bureaucratic inefficiencies in moving prisoners between facilities, and loss of existing capacity due to age and deterioration.


Background

The overall trend in the rate of imprisonment has been fairly consistent over the last fifty years. Between 1951 and 1981, judges were sending more and more people to prison, culminating in major overcrowding problems in the late 1970s. There was a short period of declining prison populations from 1981, when fines, community sentences and cautions were increasingly used as alternative punishments.

Another dip occurred in 1992 when new early release measures were introduced, following the 1991 Woolf Report into the Strangeways riots. Lord Woolf warned in the report that conditions in some prisons were "no longer tolerable" and warned that the prison population would double from 44,000 to 83,000 by 2008 on contemporary trends.

However, after less than a year, most of these measures were reversed, and the prison population began once again to rise rapidly, stimulated by the then Conservative Home Secretary Michael Howard, who avowed that "prison works".

The Labour Government has taken various measures to reduce prison overcrowding since it came to power, with mixed results. The Narey reforms of 1999 reduced prisoner numbers by reducing the numbers held on remand, and there is now greater use of additional prison places in the private sector.

In 2003, an emergency extension to the Home Detention Curfew scheme was ordered by the Home Office, permitting prisoners to leave early with an electronic tag attached to monitor their movements.

Nonetheless, under both the Conservatives and Labour there has been a dramatic increase in the use of short custodial sentences in the last 20 years, with a major impact on the prison population.


Controversies

The main controversy surrounding the issue of prison overcrowding is its negative impact on inmates. There are fewer opportunities for rehabilitative work in overcrowded prisons due to a lack of supervision and inmates are confined to their cells for longer, causing greater tensions between prisoners and with prison staff.

Prison Service research shows that 10 of the 20 establishments with the highest incidence of suicide are also in the top 20 for turnover of population.

The Prison Reform Trust has warned that 2003 saw the highest levels of prison overcrowding on record. At the end of December 2003, 81 of the 138 prisons in England and Wales were overcrowded, the most overcrowded being Preston, which was holding 667 prisoners in accommodation intended for 356. At the same time, seven prisons were overcrowded beyond the maximum safe level.

At the end of November 2003, 16,500 prisoners were living two to a one-person cell - 22 per cent of the prison population at that time.

A September 2002 report by the Prison Reform Trust and National Advisory Council of Independent Monitoring Boards found that 77 per cent of Independent Monitoring Boards believed that overcrowding was threatening prison safety.

Building new prisons seems to have had little effect: of the thirteen new facilities built in the last ten years, nine were overcrowded by the end of 2003.


Statistics

On 28 November 2003 the prison population in England and Wales stood at 74,182. In the last two years the prison population has increased by nearly 6,000

The UK has the highest imprisonment rate in the European Union at 139 per 100,000, taking over from Portugal, which has an imprisonment rate of 131 per 100,000

In 2000 the capacity of the prison estate was 63,346 and the prison population was 65,194 (103 per cent of capacity); in 2001 the capacity was 63,530 and the population was 66,403 (105 per cent); in 2002 the capacity was 64,046 and the population was 71,112 (111 per cent); and in 2003 the capacity was 66,104 and the population was 73,627 (113 per cent)

By the end of the decade Home Office projections predict a prison population of anything between 91,400 and 109,600

Statistics 1 to 3: (Source: Prison Reform Trust briefing, 2003); Statistic 4: (Source: Home Office)


Quotes

"The conditions in which prisoners have to live in overcrowded cells, cells in which they have to eat together and in which they have to defecate in front of one another are we know deeply inadequate... but where we unnecessarily allow prisoners to languish in doubled up cells nearly all day and every day, the inadequate becomes the unacceptable."

Martin Narey, Commissioner for Correctional Services, Prison Service Conference, February 2003

"The overcrowding crisis in our jails means that some offenders no longer attend appeals because they fear that by the time they return to prison, their cells, will be allocated to another inmate."

Lord Woolf, Lord Chief Justice, speaking at the annual Perrie Lecture Awards, June 6 2003

"Overcrowding threatens all the inspectorates tests of a healthy prison, safety, respect, purposeful activity and respect."

HM Chief Inspector of Prisons, annual report, 2001-2002