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).
Five big stories
Gaza | An Israeli security cabinet meeting that had been expected to discuss Benjamin Netanyahu’s call for the “full occupation” of Gaza has been postponed amid mounting tensions over whether the plan is feasible.
Immigration | YouGov has released polling on attitudes to immigration that shows a clear link between having hardline anti-immigrant views and being ignorant about the level of illegal immigration to the UK.
Technology | Google has outlined its latest step towards artificial general intelligence (AGI) with a new model that allows AI systems to interact with a convincing simulation of the real world.
Japan| The mayor of Hiroshima has led calls for the world’s most powerful countries to abandon nuclear deterrence, at a ceremony to mark 80 years since the city was destroyed by an American atomic bomb.
Music | Terry Reid, the British musician whose soaring and soulful voice earned him the nickname “Superlungs”, and whose career intersected with the likes of the Rolling Stones and Jimmy Page, has died aged 75.
In depth: The point of prisons
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.
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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.”
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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.”
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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, he said.
“In any other area of public expenditure you would say that is crazy,” Hardwick said. “You can spend that money in much better ways. I’m not a prison abolitionist and I think it’s correct in some cases to mark society’s anger and displeasure at what’s being done with prison sentences. But I don’t think that should happen to such an extent that it does more harm than good.”
What else we’ve been reading
A hopeful read about the surge in young progressives who saw Zohran Mamdani’s NYC Democratic mayoral primary win as a sign that better things are possible. It has generated a spike in leftist policies and zeal for shoe-leather campaigning. Phoebe
Victoire Ingabire is one of a number of political dissidents who are facing brutal repression for fighting for human rights. Her son Rémy Amahirwa writes a moving piece on the strain it has put on their family. Aamna
As a fan of The Office I am partial to an interview with any of the old faces. After the show, actor Ralph Ineson says he spent 20 years trying to convince people he wasn’t a misogynistic Yorkshireman. Phoebe
Dr Graeme Groom has visited Gaza 40 times. It is chilling to read his description of the terrible toll the war is having on children and families, alongside the inaction by European leaders. Aamna
This piece on the magic of Allan Ahlberg’s stories is a trip down memory lane – I loved these books growing up and read them to my nieces now. Phoebe
Sport
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.
The front pages
The Guardian has a full-width photo accompanying special coverage: “From above, Gaza is like the aftermath of an apocalypse”. The Mirror has “Epstein, the Queen and the royal box” while the Times splashes on “Migrants can use rights laws to evade deportation”. The Mail reports “Reeves facing huge tax hikes to fill £50bn black hole” and the Telegraph goes with “Reeves told ‘raise taxes now’ to fix £50bn hole”. “Kemi: Labour conducting an assault on rural life” – that’s the Express about farm inheritance tax. Top story in the Financial Times is “Woodford and company fined £46mn for ‘failures’ leading to fund’s downfall”. “Toxic culture led to Titan disaster” – the Metro on the submersible’s sinking.
Today in Focus
Is this the summer the British left comes back?
Guardian columnist Owen Jones and political correspondent Aletha Adu explore the prospects of the new leftwing party founded by Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana
Cartoon of the day | Ella Baron
The Upside
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.
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