Glimmers of hope in prisons after a “tumultuous” year

Prisons have had a “tumultuous” year but there are encouraging signs that the political costs of our addiction to imprisonment may have finally hit home with ministers, a new briefing from the Prison Reform Trust suggests.

“The Government should seize this opportunity to show that the status quo is not working and present a positive alternative vision for our criminal justice system,” says the charity’s chief executive Pia Sinha writing in the introduction to the latest edition of the Bromley Briefings Prison Factfile launched today.

“One that is rooted in the things that matter to the communities that they serve—safety, fairness, effectiveness and decency—and which relies on evidence rather than rhetoric,” Sinha adds.

PRT’s annual Bromley Briefings Prison Factfile highlights the latest facts and figures about our prisons and the people in them. Drawn largely from government statistics, and fully referenced, they provide an authoritative source of information on prison conditions. The evidence they contain underpin PRT’s programmes and advocacy work to influence ministers and policy makers.

Key facts revealed in this year’s edition include:

• Scotland and England and Wales have the highest imprisonment rates in western Europe.
• The prison population has risen by 93% in the last 30 years and currently stands at 87,982.
• For more serious, indictable offences, the average prison sentence is now 62.4 months—almost two years longer than in 2010.
• More than two and a half times as many people were sentenced to 10 years or more in the 12 months to December 2022 than the same period in 2010.
• More than 44,000 people were sent to prison to serve a sentence in the year to June 2023. The majority had committed a non-violent offence. Almost two in five were sentenced to serve six months or less.
• Short prison sentences are less effective than community sentences at reducing reoffending.
• Community sentences are particularly effective for people with many previous offences, people aged under 21 and over 50, and people with mental health problems. Yet, their use has more than halved in only a decade.

Charting a difficult 12 months for people living and working in prisons, Sinha highlights how:

• The chief inspector of prisons issued five urgent notifications (UN)—raising immediate, urgent concerns about conditions—the highest number in a single year.
• The prison service ran out of places, forcing the government to adopt emergency measures to hold people in police cells; release people from prison early; delay court hearings; and warn judges about the pressure on our already overcrowded prisons.
• Meanwhile, staff leave the service in droves. Quickly burnt out by the conditions they face each day as they pick up their keys to start their shift.
• Prisons continue to be places of hopelessness and despair for too many people, with levels of self-harm now higher than before the pandemic, and self-harm by women reaching its highest level on record.

“Whilst crisis and scandal can trigger defensiveness and introspection, they can also act as a launch pad for bold reform” Sinha says. She commends the current justice secretary Alex Chalk for having “begun this journey” to set out a positive alternative vision for the justice system. Sinha highlights from his record as justice secretary since he was appointed 10 months ago:

• A swift reconsideration of his predecessor’s intransigence to ending the injustice of the Imprisonment for Public Protection (IPP) sentence.
• A reversal of measures which prevented people from progressing in their sentences.
• The introduction of legislation—currently before Parliament—for a presumption that prison sentences of a year or less should instead be replaced with a suspended prison sentence.

“All of these are causes for celebration in a sector where the wins are few and hard fought for,” Sinha adds.

Drawing on her own experience as governor of HMP Liverpool, Sinha highlights overcrowding as “the single biggest barrier in providing a safe, decent and rehabilitative prison.” “I know first-hand the powerful impact that reducing prisoner numbers had on my ability to bring about the reform measures that were needed” she says. “Having fewer people in the prison not only reduced the churn of people flowing in and out of the gates each day, but it also gave me and my management team some breathing space to work through the plethora of problems we needed to fix.”

Sinha concludes: “As long as we have a justice system trapped in survival mode—one that is focused on just getting through the day—prisons are unlikely to become the places that they need to be in order to deliver on their core mission. Unless there is truth and honesty in this age-old debate of how society should respond to crime, and the political will to break out of the dysfunctional and reactive cycle of lock ‘em up or let ‘em out, we will continue to get the justice system we deserve. This requires not just a reset in one prison—transferring the burden onto another overstretched governor and their staff. This requires a reset of the system, with a positive vision for what our criminal justice system should look like. As the new chief executive of the Prison Reform Trust, I assure you that we will be that voice.”