20 February 2004
The prison population in England and Wales reached an all-time high this week – pushing the Prison Service close to 'unsafe' levels and a full-blown crisis, experts warned.
Prisoner numbers reached 74,543 following a substantial rise – around 1,500 – in the number of inmates incarcerated last month.
The Prison Reform Trust lobby group said the new figures placed the Prison Service just 500 inmates short of its 'safe, overcrowded' capacity and warned that police cells will have to be used shortly unless ministers act quickly. The use of cells is the only immediate way of detaining inmates once an official 'unsafe' population level has been reached.
Experts blamed the government's tough sentencing policy. PRT director Juliet Lyon said: '[This] should set the alarm bells ringing for a government preoccupied with tough talk.
'To avoid a crisis it must now act to divert petty offenders into effective community penalties, addicts into rehabilitation and the mentally ill into the health system, as well as curbing excessive sentence lengths.'
She also called on the Home Office to encourage wider use of custodial remand.
More than 80 jails are now formally classified as overcrowded. Of these, 11 had exceeded their maximum capacity by the end of January, including the much-criticised sites at Wormwood Scrubs, Ashwell and Lincoln.
Building new prisons has not provided a solution. In the past ten years, 13 new sites have opened, but of these nine are now overcrowded.
Last month, Home Office figures revealed that for the second consecutive year, England and Wales were the jail capitals of the European Union, with the highest imprisonment rate of 141 per 100,000 people.
PFfeb2004
