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If there’s one thing everyone in the justice system agrees on, it’s that our prisons are jammed full. In England and Wales, 61 per cent are overcrowded. This prevents effective rehabilitation of inmates and ultimately that’s dangerous for the public, potentially even delaying rapists being sent to jail.
The Government’s abolition of short-term sentences for low-level offenders to free up more space for the most serious criminals – confirmed on Monday by the Justice Secretary, Alex Chalk – will therefore please many prison officers, social care workers and reforming politicians.
But the crisis in the nation’s prisons – and in the wider criminal justice system, with long delays in courts – runs so deep that experts believe much bigger changes are urgently needed. Whether any government will be bold enough to implement that remains dubious.
“Justice is not fashionable enough,” laments the MP Robert Buckland, who is a registered barrister and served as Justice Secretary from 2019 to 2021. “It goes down the list of priorities and doesn’t get the prominence that it deserves.” This is especially the case with prisons, he tells i.
“With a few hundred million pounds, we could make a hell of a difference. But as always, it gets swamped – by health in particular, where their billions seem to trump the millions that we need to sort out the justice system.”
Alex South is a former prison officer who worked in English jails for a decade before leaving the service in 2021, disillusioned by a worrying decline in conditions.
Overcrowding is a “huge problem” and reducing the prison population is “an immediate pressing concern,” she tells i.
“When I was at Wormwood Scrubs, that jail was built in the 1800s when each cell was meant to be single. Today we have the same cells but with two people in them.
“People are going to the toilet in front of each other in these spaces, they’re also expected to eat there, they won’t get a shower every day so they wash in there too. It’s demeaning and dehumanising, and then we expect them to come out and have transformed their lives.
“At Scrubs, we were keeping these guys, some of them teenagers, in their cells for 23 hours a day.” This means a greater risk of self-harm, she says, while the “tiniest provocation can turn into a fight and lead to extreme violence. There was a murder in a cell at Scrubs two months after I left.”
The situation is little better in Scotland’s devolved system. Its largest prison, Barlinnie in east Glasgow, has recently been holding around 1,400 prisoners despite being designed for fewer than 1,000. Things are so bad that there could be a “catastrophic failure” at any time, according to its governor.
South, who describes her experiences in the book Behind These Doors, says that short sentences are often “pointless”. Criminals who come in for just a few months, serving only half their terms, are out so quickly that there’s no time for rehabilitative work. They can also be exposed to bad influences while inside.
“Sometimes removing them from the streets for a brief period can help their personal safety,” she acknowledges. But often the system is too overwhelmed to prevent them returning to the same problems that landed them in jail: perhaps drug addiction, mental health issues or local gangs.