Ministers should scrap Conservative plans to build new mega-jails and pour £4bn into the prevention of crime and rehabilitation instead, the former chief inspector of prisons has said.
Nick Hardwick, who is also a former head of the Parole Board, said a huge expansion of the prison system would not solve the problem, especially when average custodial sentences are rising.
Keir Starmer inherited a crisis in the prisons system when he took office, and blamed the previous government for letting prisons operate at 99% capacity for 18 months with a net number of 100 prisoners added every week. He announced an expansion of the Tory scheme of releasing tens of thousands of inmates early to try to prevent jails becoming full.
On top of the early release scheme, Labour has suggested it will keep the Conservatives’ plan to expand the prison system by at least 14,000 places in England and Wales, up from about 89,000 now, including six new prisons, at a cost of £4bn. Planned “super-prisons” in Lancashire, Leicestershire and Buckinghamshire have been hit by delays.
Pressure on prisons has only increased with riots across England this month leading to more than 1,000 arrests.
But, in an interview with the Guardian, Hardwick said hugely expanding the prison system was not the solution and that the current size of the incarcerated population was unsustainable.
“The basic problem is that people are coming into the system faster than they are going out. If you think of it like a bath, the bath is overflowing and water is still coming in,” he said.
“The strategy has been up until now – and what Labour is continuing to do – is bail out the bath … That will certainly buy them some time. But it doesn’t solve the problem completely. The system is set to continue to increase.
“Labour have said they were going to spend billions, literally billions, on new prisons. But if they bought themselves a bit of time, would it be better to reinvest that money in trying to stop people going into prison in the first place – working in schools, in health, in mental health?
“You could ask people: do you want people to go to prison for a few months longer at a cost of billions of pounds, or spend that money on hospitals and schools?”
Hardwick said he thought prison was “right for those involved in the riots, and the speed at which this was done – in contrast to how the system usually works – will be a deterrent”.
But he added: “I think the system will cope until [the end of] August provided there are no more crises but in the longer term the current prison population is unsustainable without billions being spent. And even then I don’t think the new places can be delivered in time to deal with the sustained upward pressure in the population.”
Hardwick was chief inspector of prisons from 2010 to 2016 and then head of the Parole Board until 2018. He quit the Parole Board after judges overturned the release of the rapist John Worboys, though Hardwick played no role in the decision.
Hardwick, who was a professor of criminal justice at Royal Holloway, University of London, until last month, said the policy of building more big jails would simply mean prisoners spending a few extra months inside, which was unlikely to act as a deterrent to crime:
“I don’t think it’s a good way to spend money to build big new prisons. We are spending billions on an untested model that we don’t know works. We’ve not run prisons of this size before.
“Even if in the longer run they work, by the nature of these prisons they will have new, inexperienced staff, so you are going to have real problems in some of them, I think. You might want to replace some of the crumbling Victorian ruins. But I think they need to think very carefully about whether they want to invest at this level given how short of money they are and put that money somewhere else.”
The average custodial sentence had risen from 18 months in 2013 to 23 months in 2023, he said.
The justice secretary, Shabana Mahmood, told the Telegraph in an interview before the election that Labour would build more prisons by prioritising them in the planning system. However, Labour’s manifesto did not commit to a specific number of new prisons or amount of prison places.
Starmer’s government has said solving the prisons crisis is a priority, and appointed James Timpson, a businessman who employs former prisoners, to the role of justice minister. Timpson has previously said that he thinks prison does not work for many people, and that only a third of inmates should really be there.
Victims’ groups have raised concerns about plans to release some prisoners after 40% of their sentences, but Hardwick said this would allow some suspects who are on bail and yet to be convicted to be sentenced and off the streets sooner.
“Mistakes will be made. I’m sure about that, because you’re talking about big numbers and some people will reoffend,” he said. “They will reoffend a bit sooner than they would otherwise have reoffended. But if we leave the system as it is we have no possibility of addressing their behaviour.
“And we are in a position now where, because the prison system is full, you have people on bail accused of domestic violence – who might be innocent – but if they’re guilty we can’t process them quickly enough to reduce the threat because of the problems in the system.
“You have victims waiting for years for the trial and to know what will happen. They can’t sort the backlog unless they sort the prison population out.”
A Ministry of Justice spokesperson said: “This government is committed to addressing the crisis in our prisons, and ensuring our jails make better citizens, not better criminals.
“That has started with the emergency capacity measures introduced by the lord chancellor last month, and 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.”
