Blog: Running hot…

The government’s retreat from a meaningful early release scheme, by adding further exemptions and narrowing eligibility in response to political pressure, may feel like a safer course. In reality, it risks making prisons and communities less safe. The Prison Reform Trust’s latest Bromley Briefings show a system already running beyond tolerance: the prison population has risen by 94% since 1990 and now stands at 87,249; 72% of prisons in England and Wales were overcrowded in 2024–25; more than 21,600 people are held in overcrowded accommodation; and 49% of prisons are rated as having concerning or seriously concerning performance. Against that backdrop, continuing to trade rehabilitation for warehousing is not realism but evasion. We should be honest about what we are choosing: more people held for longer in institutions already operating beyond their limits, and fewer opportunities to address the causes of crime.

This pressure is not theoretical. This is not a service with spare capacity to absorb symbolic toughness. It is a service struggling to deliver the basics.

If the answer to public concern is simply to exclude more categories of offence from earlier release, without a corresponding plan to reduce demand, strengthen probation, invest in treatment, and improve resettlement, the future becomes painfully predictable. Prison governors will continue to manage by crisis. Staff will unlock too few people for too little purposeful activity. Workshops, education departments and offending behaviour programmes will be overwhelmed, cancelled or inaccessible. People will leave prison not better prepared to live safely in the community, but more institutionalised, more damaged and more disconnected.

Overcrowding corrodes every part of prison life. Two people in cells built for one. Broken showers, leaking roofs and failing heating. Long delays for healthcare. Restricted regimes dressed up as routine. The crumbling physical estate becomes a mirror of a crumbling moral purpose: custody reduced to containment, with hope rationed and rehabilitation deferred.

In that environment, self-harm rises, drug markets flourish and violence becomes an informal currency. People in prison accumulate debt, fear and trauma. Staff are asked to do impossible jobs with insufficient numbers, inadequate support and little time to build the relationships that keep prisons safe. Leaders become experts in contingency rather than improvement, moving from one operational emergency to the next while knowing that the fundamentals remain unchanged.

Nor does warehousing protect victims or the public in the long term. Most people in prison will come home. The question is whether they return with somewhere to live, a route into work, access to mental health and drug treatment, and supervision that is skilled, proportionate and properly resourced. If not, the risk is carried by the next victim: the person whose home is burgled, the woman threatened by a former partner, the shop worker assaulted, the child drawn into a household destabilised by addiction, debt or untreated trauma. A system that locks people up until the last possible moment, while doing too little with the time it has, does not reduce that risk. It stores it up, concentrates it, and then releases it back into communities.

There is also a hard financial truth. Prison is one of the most expensive ways the state can fail. The latest Ministry of Justice data puts the average cost per prisoner at over £53,000 a year, while parliamentary evidence has put the wider economic and social cost of reoffending by adults at around £20.9 billion annually. Every pound spent on holding people in overcrowded, decaying prisons without meaningful rehabilitation is a pound not spent on victims’ services, drug treatment, mental health care, housing, youth work, probation or the community interventions that prevent crime in the first place.

The choice before government is not between public protection and reform. The evidence of overcrowded, unsafe and failing prisons tells us that reform is public protection, and that prevention is better value for the public purse than repeated crisis spending. Early release, if used, must be transparent, properly supervised and accompanied by investment in probation and community services. But abandoning the principle because the politics are difficult leaves us with the worst of all worlds: prisons too full to rehabilitate, future victims left exposed to avoidable harm, taxpayers funding a system that is expensive but ineffective, and a justice system trapped in a permanent state of emergency.

We should expect more than survival from our prisons. A decent prison system would be smaller, safer and more purposeful. It would reserve custody for those who must be there, use community sentences confidently where they are more effective, and make every day in custody count. The alternative is not firmness. It is failure, repeated at scale.

Pia Sinha
Chief executive