In today's newsletter: From longer sentences to rising recall rates, prioritising punishment over rehabilitation could mean a total collapse of our prisons
The UK's prison system is in serious trouble. That sentence should come as no surprise to regular readers. But a damning independent review by former prisons watchdog Dame Anne Owers has revealed the whole system came close to total collapse on three separate occasions within a 12 month period.
The report lays the blame squarely at the feet of successive governments. Between autumn 2023 and summer 2024, ministers repeatedly failed to get a grip on the growing crisis - so much so that experts were left wondering whether inaction was a political choice. Senior civil servants, fearing a total breakdown of the criminal justice system, kept meticulous records of key decisions and documents in case there was ever a public or parliamentary inquiry.
In October 2023, the government started releasing prisoners 18 days early. That number was soon bumped up to 35 days, and then 70. When Labour took office last year, one of its first acts was to announce even earlier releases for prisoners who have served 40% of their sentence.
Despite these measures, the system is still buckling. Prisons are running at nearly 97.5% capacity, and this weekend could bring fresh pressure, with large-scale protests expected.
To understand why prisons seem trapped in this endless loop of crisis, and what it might take to actually fix things, I spoke to Nick Hardwick, former chief inspector of prisons and current chair of Nacro (National Association for the Care and Resettlement of Offenders).
To really understand what's going wrong, you have to ask: what are prisons actually for? According to Hardwick, prisons are meant to do four things.
First, incapacitation: locking up people who are dangerous so they can't hurt others. Second, deterrence: both general (so the rest of us don't break the law) and specific (so that someone who's been to prison doesn't want to go back). Then there's rehabilitation: the idea that time in prison could help someone change. And finally, punishment: not because it necessarily helps the offender, but because society wants to show that serious wrongdoing has consequences.
The trouble, according to Hardwick, is that we're failing on every level. "You can incapacitate people when they're in prison, but most people are going to come out again, and you have to hope they don't come out worse. There's no evidence to support the idea that giving people longer sentences works as a deterrent," Hardwick said. "And we know that it's very difficult to rehabilitate people."
Punishment, Hardwick said, is the most powerful reason people support prison and it's what lands politically. "Whether you're reading the Guardian or the Telegraph, there's widespread anger over certain offences and a belief that harsher punishment is the answer."
But the political appetite for punishment is part of the problem. We've become gluttons for punishment, to repurpose a saying - addicted to the performance of toughness, even when it breaks the very system it's meant to uphold.
The arithmetic of the prison crisis
The report criticises what it calls a "salami-slicing approach" to dealing with the crisis, with politicians tinkering at the edges rather than addressing the core problems. That comes as no surprise to Hardwick. "The prison crisis was entirely predictable. I taught students back in 2021 that there'd be a crisis in 2023 and 2024 because the arithmetic was perfectly clear."
To explain why, Hardwick returns to a metaphor from his conversation with my colleague Archie Bland last year: think of a bath. "The water's coming in at the same rate, but the outflow is being blocked because people aren't being released as quickly as they were, so the bath fills and overflows. You have to address the basic arithmetic of the prison crisis: you have to stop the prison population growing faster than you can grow capacity."
The factors at play
Hardwick argued the increase in the prison population is partly down to the increase in longer prison sentences. He pointed to official statistics (pdf) that show that the average sentence length for all types of offences has increased from 13.7 months in 2010 to 20.9 months in 2023. There was a particularly sharp increase from 2020 to 2023, when average sentences increased from 17.1 months to 20.9 months.
"How we work out whether a sentence is correct is how they relate to one another. If you make sentences longer at the top end of the sentencing range, for murder or knife offences, that has a consequence of pulling all other sentences, including less serious offences, along with them," Hardwick said.
The second factor, and perhaps the most important, is that we're recalling more people to prisons, Hardwick added. "Most people who leave prison are going to be on a licence; there are conditions they have to meet and if they don't they'll be recalled back to prison. We now recall a much higher proportion of people than we're used to, not because they've committed an offence, but because they've broken some rule."
Reforms are unpopular
The problem with the prison crisis is that many of the most effective solutions are politically unpopular across the spectrum. That's especially true of one of the most impactful: cutting sentencing down.
Politicians, both left and right, talk instead about building more prisons. "But unless they do something about sentences, they're going to run out of space again," Hardwick said.
What could have broader political resonance is the argument that £10bn of taxpayer money is being spent on building new prison provision and hundreds of millions every year on running them despite there being no evidence that it's achieving what we want it to,hesaid.
"In any other area of public expenditure you would say that is crazy,"Hardwicksaid."Youcanspendthatmoneyinmuchbetterways.I'mnotaprisonabolitionistandIthinkit'scorrectinsomecasestomarksociety'sangeranddispleasureatwhat'sbeingdonewithprisonsentences.ButIdon'tthinkthatshouldhappenstosuchanextentthatitdoesmoreharmthangood."
Cricket | England's attempt to regain the Ashes this winter will be broadcast live in the UK by TNT Sports. After agreeing a one-year deal over the weekend TNT now has the rights for all of England's winter tours.
Rugby | Wearing boots designed for men causes discomfort for a majority of female rugby players, according to new research which finds as many as 89% of them experience pain from wearing shoes not built for women's feet.
Football | The former Arsenal footballer Thomas Partey has appeared in court charged with six sexual offences. The 32-year-old was bailed to appear at the Old Bailey for trial later this year over allegations of rape and sexual assault.
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A bit of good news to remind you that the world's not all bad
Wular was once among Asia's largest freshwater lakes. It was renowned for its high-quality lotus plants which sustained the livelihoods of more than 5,000 people who harvested and sold nadru - the edible lotus stem cherished as a delicacy in Kashmiri households.
Then, in 1992, devastating floods hit the region. They choked the lake bed with silt, wiping out the lotus plants and plunging families into poverty.
In 2020, authorities began a dredging programme to restore the lake's depth. More than 7.9m cubic metres of silt have been removed and the lotus flowers are blooming again after an absence of three decades. "Now that it's back, we're preparing dishes the way our grandmothers did," said Tavir Ahmad, a chef in a Kashmir market.