In the dying days of the last government, officials met to discuss plans to deal with prison overcrowding. One solution floated: a dilapidated barge situated off Rikers Island in New York.
The 625-foot long and five-story high Vernon C Bain Center had echoes of the Bibby Stockholm scheme the Home Office used to house asylum seekers. But the idea to haul the rusted blue vessel, already earmarked for retirement, across the Atlantic was never enacted over concerns about securing the site, according to two government officials.
Instead, with English and Welsh jails close to “breaking point”, they settled on releasing some prisoners weeks earlier than planned.
“It is a mark of the real desperation they had, they were running out of options,” said Nick Hardwick, former chief inspector of prisons and ex-chair of the Parole Board for England and Wales. “They considered absolutely everything before going for early release.”
As Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer inherits a creaking prison network — now exacerbated by the arrest of more than 1,000 people after far-right violence this month — the government faces a dilemma: either curb the UK’s ever-longer sentencing mindset, or find more jail spaces.
“The system we are in now does not serve victims,” added Hardwick. “Rhetoric hasn’t worked.”
Hardwick is part of a chorus of former officials who have argued that the early release of prisoners is a tacit admission that sentencing lengths have reached untenable levels and that the punishment meted out to offenders requires a more pragmatic approach.
England and Wales already have the highest imprisonment rate in western Europe with about 141 prisoners per 100,000 of population, according to the Prison Reform Trust. This compares with 106 in France and 67 in Germany.
The prison population is projected to increase to 114,800 by March 2028, up from around 87,400 at the end of July 2024. Capacity, already stretched by the practice of assigning two prisoners to the same cell, is 88,800 in England and Wales.
Average sentence lengths have increased from 13.7 months in 2010 to 20.9 months in 2023, according to the Ministry of Justice. “Sentencing inflation” has been driven by changes in policy that have resulted in increases in the minimum and maximum terms for a range of offences.
“We lock up more [people] and we lock them up for longer,” Lord Ian Burnett, former head of the judiciary in England and Wales, told the House of Lords last month. “That would be a good thing only if it were supported by evidence of an overall benefit. But it is not.”
The new government, he said, has a chance to adopt a radical approach.
Ministers have in the past outlined plans to increase the time spent in prison for violent and sexual offences in response to a number of high-profile cases that have exacerbated public concern and led to calls for tougher sentencing.
The decision to stretch term lengths for “minor” offences such as common assault and theft have bloated the system — contributing towards spare capacity falling below levels considered safe.
It has also contributed towards a bottleneck in the court system that has slowed sentencing and resulted in an environment where less serious offences are overlooked because of capacity constraints.
Hardwick said that it was questionable whether sending people who commit less serious offences to prison for a few months longer was acting as a deterrent. “It won’t change behaviour,” he said.
The previous government attempted to pass the Sentencing Bill, which included a presumption against short sentences below 12 months in favour of releasing people into the community on licence and under supervision.
Plans were thwarted by Tory MPs, while justice secretary Shabana Mahmood at the time argued the probation service needed more resources to cope with demand. Proposals could be reintroduced and refined under the new government following a review of sentencing and probation.
The Ministry of Justice said: “We will set out a 10-year strategy for prison supply later this year. We will also introduce a new focus on driving down reoffending, linking up prison governors with local employers to break the cycle of crime.”
Mark Day, deputy director of the charity Prison Reform Trust, said the new government needed to address rising sentencing lengths. Speaking before the recent far-right unrest that has seen some rioters jailed for three years, he warned it would be “foolish of the government” to introduce measures to increase any sentences.
Ministers have used early release as a pressure valve on the system, with plans to let inmates out 18 days before their scheduled release introduced in October last year, and since increased to 35 days, and then to 70 days.
The decision to release prisoners after just 40 per cent of their sentence from September chafed with victims’ charities, but has given Mahmood about 18 months of breathing room to get on top of the crisis, according to her predecessor Alex Chalk.
Mahmood has promised to seize control of the planning process and classify prisons of “national importance” to deliver thousands of new prison spaces, while undertaking a sentencing and probation review to develop a strategy to cope with pressures.
Stomaching some political backlash to undertake reforms could be worth it in the long term, according to Alessio Scandurra, a researcher at the European Prison Observatory. He said some European counterparts had success recasting certain crimes, such as drug offences.
“Even if a new government loses some public support tackling the issue in prisons, maybe when the next election comes, nobody will care any more because time has passed,” he said.
Starmer appointed businessman James Timpson as prisons minister on his first day in office. Heir of the eponymous shoe repair business, Timpson is a former chair of the Prison Reform Trust and has said that about a third of current inmates — including many women — are needlessly incarcerated.
Hardwick said Timpson’s appointment was encouraging and signalled that Starmer was open to reform.
“The tone of the new government is encouraging but they’ve got to deliver.”