02/12/2022
Police Oracle
We have always known that our prison system is overcrowded; it’s been that way for many years.
Official figures show that the prison system as a whole has been overcrowded in every year since 1994.
Almost two in every three prisons in England and Wales are overcrowded (77 of the 120 prisons), with more than 15,900 people held in overcrowded accommodation—more than a fifth of the prison population.
Nevertheless, with the dip in the prison population owing to the pandemic and the government committing £4 billion to build a total of 18,000 new prison places with the 1,680 places in HMP Five Wells opening earlier this year, it was still something of a surprise when the Prisons Minister Damian Hinds was forced to request the emergency use of 400 police cells for people on remand earlier this week.
Ministers blamed the recent barristers’ strike for an “acute and sudden increase in the prison population” of 800 in the last two months.
Penal reformers disagreed, saying that the government’s constant call for longer sentences for a wide range of offences was a more significant factor. The latest official criminal justice statistics published earlier this month portrayed a complex picture of how the courts are faring in tackling the backlog which was exacerbated by the pandemic.
The figures showed that, overall, prosecutions for indictable offences have decreased by 14%, but prosecutions for violence against the person and sexual offences have increased, by 21% and 17%, respectively, when compared to pre-COVID levels in the year ending June 2019.
Fraud has seen the largest increase, rising by 7 percentage points from the year ending June 2021, to a custody rate of 32%. Drug offences also increased by 6 percentage points since the year ending June 2021, up to 29% in the latest year.
This focus on serious offences is reflected in the custody rate which has risen to levels seen pre-pandemic at 33% in the latest year, after a fall in the year ending June 2021. The average custodial sentence length (ACSL) for indictable offences has continued to rise from 22.6 months in the year ending June 2021 to 25.7 months in the latest year. The largest increases are seen in sexual offences (from 54.3 months to 64.3 months in the latest year) and drug offences (from 39.0 months to 43.7 months in the latest year).
In a nutshell, while there is a slow increase in the number of people being sent to prison, there is a definite decrease in the number being released as people serve longer and longer sentences. The overcrowding is amplified by the growth in the number of people (particularly those serving short prison sentences) being released from prison and then recalled – often for not complying with the terms of their licence supervised by the probation service.
There were 82,839 inmates in prisons across England and Wales on 25 November, compared with 79,685 at the same point in 2021.
During the same period, prison officers have been leaving their jobs at an increasing rate, giving rise to concerns about the experience levels of those left in post.
Whether people remanded in custody over the next few weeks would prefer to be in an under-staffed prison with a restricted regime or banged up in their local police station with no access to any activities out of their cell is a moot point.
This is the first time in 14 years that the government has had to tackle prison overcrowding by the use of police custody suites. We shall follow this story closely on Work with Offenders and let you know whether Operation Safeguard (as it is slightly bizarrely named) is a temporary stop-gap or an enduring part of the response to our ever-increasing prison population.