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Prison: the facts

Introduction

Prison: the facts is an interactive resource that presents key data about people in prison in England and Wales. Built primarily from official government sources and fully referenced, it offers a clear and accessible overview of the prison system, highlighting long-term trends and recent developments. Many of the charts are interactive — hover over them to reveal detailed data points and explore patterns over time.

Try out the chart below by rolling your cursor or finger over the line to see the growth in the remand prison population.

Remand on the rise

The number of people in prison on remand is now at its highest level in at least 50 years

Source: Ministry of Justice (2025). Offender management statistics quarterly: January to March 2025. And previous editions

Over the past two decades, the prison population has grown dramatically. Sentences have become longer, and the use of custody has expanded — often with serious social and economic consequences. This resource charts those changes, revealing the pressures of overcrowding, the impact of budget cuts, and the challenges faced by people living and working in prisons. It also explores the pace of reform in the justice system and the potential for community-based alternatives to custody.

You can explore the resource using the sections on the left, or click the button below to move to the next section.

Feedback

We would welcome feedback as we continue to develop this resource. Your comments will help us improve its clarity, usefulness and accessibility. If you would like to share your thoughts, please complete this short feedback form.

FAQs

  • This resource replaces our previous short publication Prison: the facts, offering a more dynamic and interactive way to explore the data. It is designed as a primer — a starting point for understanding prisons and the people in them — and is intentionally less detailed than our flagship Bromley Briefings Prison Factfile. The briefings remain the most comprehensive source of prison data across the UK, including Scotland and Northern Ireland.

  • This first online edition of Prison: the facts draws primarily on data from the February 2026 edition of the Bromley Briefings.

  • We plan to update the data annually. Alongside this, we are continuing to develop the technology behind the resource, aiming to automate more of the data processing. This will allow us to provide more frequent updates in future, starting with key quarterly datasets published by the Ministry of Justice — including Offender Management Statistics, Safety in Custody Statistics, and Criminal Justice Statistics.