Prison population out of control
Yesterday’s updated Prison Population Projection from the Ministry of Justice and Office for National Statistics makes for, quite frankly, terrifying reading. Readers will know that there is no spare capacity in the prison system at the moment with a wide range of crisis management tactics already in use. So the news that the prison population is projected to increase to between 94,600 and 114,800 by March 2028, with a central estimate of 105,800 was greeted with horror by penal commentators.
This projected long-term increase is predicated on several factors, including continued growth in police charging and prosecutorial activity and falling Crown Court outstanding caseloads (both of which could increase inflows into the prison system and in turn the prison population), and changes in sentencing policy and behaviour to keep the most serious offenders in prison for longer.
Uncertainty
The ONS is clear that there is considerable uncertainty around the projections. While they are based on the best available evidence, but there is considerable uncertainty around how the courts will reduce the outstanding caseload and the impact of police charging activity on future crime mix and incoming demand into the system. Any differences in assumptions for other factors such as sentencing behaviours and future changes in policy will all result in variation from these projections. It is, of course, difficult to know what policy decisions a new, probably Labour (?) Government would make, but certainly both main parties are currently entrenched in a communication battle to present themselves as tougher on crime than the alternative.
While some commentators (including myself) are sceptical that the Government will succeed in reducing the Crown Court backlog sufficiently rapidly to have a noticeable increase in the influx of sentenced prisoners, failure in this regard will simply mean that the record high numbers of people on remand will not reduce as forecast, continuing to inflate the numbers of people in our prisons.
An ageing population
Longer sentences and reduced opportunities for release on parole mean that the numbers of adult males, adult females and offenders aged 50 years and over are all expected to increase over the projection period.
The chart reproduced below presents the actual prison population between January 2017 and November 2023, with central, low and high population projections from December 2023 to March 2028.
Who will be in prison?
The determinate population is projected to grow over the whole projection period in the central and high scenarios and the increase in this category is the main driver for the projected rise in the total population since the determinate sub-population is the single largest group. The projected growth in the determinate population is driven by an increase in the number of offenders receiving a determinate sentence, due to continued increases in police and prosecutorial charging activity and criminal courts working to reduce the volume of outstanding cases. In the long-term, changes in sentencing policy and behaviour, which will keep the most serious offenders in prison for longer, lead to a build-up of prisoners serving longer sentences.
The indeterminate population consists of offenders who serve Imprisonment for Public Protection (IPP) and life sentences. This population is projected to fall over the projection period driven by the gradual decline of IPP offenders. Offenders can no longer receive an IPP sentence due to its abolition in 2012, with current IPP offenders being released by the Parole Board. Of course there will continue to be significant numbers of IPP prisoners in prison, recalled after their release.
The recall population is projected to increase for the duration of the projection period. The increase is partly due to the expected growth of the determinate population – this will result
in a larger pool of offenders on licence after serving the custodial part of their sentence, and a proportion of this group will be recalled to custody. About 20% of the offenders currently in the recall population have been recalled to prison following an indeterminate sentence.
This cohort of the recall population is also projected to increase over the projection period because more offenders will leave prison following an indeterminate sentence and therefore
more people will be eligible to be recalled to custody.
You can see the projected split of the prison population in the table I have reproduced below.
Conclusion
Despite being the country which imprisons the greatest proportion of our citizens in Western Europe, we seem doubly determined that the only way to tackle crime (which has dropped significantly over the past 20 years) is to lock up more and more people.
Every extra billion pounds spent on prisons removes the equivalent amount from our ailing health, social care and education services.
Thanks to Andy Aitchison for kind permission to use the header image in this post. You can see Andy’s work here
