Operation Safeguard
Yesterday (9 May 2024), the Ministry of Justice announced that it was once more having to use police cells to hold people for whom there is no room in our prison system. Operation Safeguard, as this emergency measure is known, was triggered for the second time in two years.
The MoJ spokesperson described the move as a response “to acute capacity pressures caused in part by barristers’ industrial action and the aftermath of the pandemic.” In this blog post, I provide a full analysis of the reasons why our prisons are full to bursting.
Analysis
I’m afraid to say that the MoJ statement is at best misleading. Let’s take the points one by one. Perhaps the most fundamental misdirection is the statement that this is an acute problem. The data would suggest that in fact the problem is chronic and a direct consequence of policy decisions made over recent years (and indeed, decades).
The repeated claims by politicians (of all political persuasions) that crime is out of control and that their party is the toughest on crime have led to a widespread belief amongst many people that prisoners in the UK are given shorter sentences than most countries. Unfortunately, the most recent facts are:
- Scotland and England and Wales have the highest imprisonment rates in western Europe.
- The prison population has risen by 75% in the last 30 years and currently stands at 87,982.
- For more serious, indictable offences, the average prison sentence is now 62.4 months—almost two years longer than in 2010.
- More than two and a half times as many people were sentenced to 10 years or more in the 12 months to December 2022 than the same period in 2010.
- More than 44,000 people were sent to prison to serve a sentence in the year to June 2023. The majority had committed a non-violent offence. Almost two in five were sentenced to serve six months or less.
The single most important fact though is that our desire to lock up more of our fellow citizens for longer coincides with a huge drop in the number of crimes committed over the last 25-30 years. The chart below comes from the Office for National Statistics most recent Crime Survey for England and Wales – our most reliable source since it asks members of the public what crimes they have experienced, whether they reported them or not. In other words, recent concerns about under-recording of crimes by hard-pressed police services are irrelevant to these figures.
Court delays
The spokesperson’s claim that prison overcrowding is caused in part by barristers’ industrial action and the aftermath of the pandemic is accurate. But only in the sense that my failure to have a twenty year career as centre forward for Coventry City was caused in part by me twisting my ankle before a Sunday league game when a scout was rumoured to be attending.
As you can see from the chart below, again based on the most recent official figures up to the end of December 2023, there were 67,573 outstanding cases at our Crown Courts on that date. As many police officers and lawyers will know, it is not uncommon for new trials to be scheduled for 2026 or later. Indeed the latest official figures show that for the last quarter of 2023, the average (median) time for a Crown Court trial to be completed was 398 days from when the case first became the business of that Court.
There were 40,817 outstanding cases at the start of the pandemic, already the largest recorded number in history. This figure had increased to 51,161 by the end of September 2020 (an increase of 10,334) when almost all Crown Courts were re-opened and emergency nightingale courts were opened to deal with the backlog. Barristers went on strike (working every other week between June and October 2022), during which time the backlog increased by 3,230. Therefor these two factors accounted for an absolute maximum of 13,564 extra cases while the backlog has increased by 26,756 during the period between March 2020 and December 2023. It is also important to remember that crime rates went down substantially during COVID lockdowns with people confined to their own homes.
The main reasons for the big increase in Court delays, resulting in our highest ever remand population, are lack of staffing and dilapidated court buildings.
Confusion
The reason for such widespread media coverage of the prison overcrowding crisis this week has been a political furore over the MoJ’s main emergency response to the problem over recent months – releasing prisoners earlier from their sentence. Unsurprisingly in an election year, the Government has tended to make as few public pronouncements as possible on the matter. When it emerged this week that the MoJ was once again increasing the number of days early that people in prison would be released – from an initial 18 days to a planned 70 day/10 weeks early release at the end of this month, there was quite reasonable concern that a chronically under-staffed probation service would be unable to properly supervise this big increase in numbers.
The independent domestic abuse commissioner, Nicole Jacobs, made it clear there had been no consultation about the planned increase and that many survivors would not even know that their perpetrator was back on the streets, highlighting the fact that perpetrators of domestic abuse frequently receive short prison sentences and are likely to be among those released early.
The irony for the Government is that it is currently in the middle of a £4bn prison building programme to increase prison capacity. Despite the addition of 5,856 new places created over the last four years by a combination of new prisons and expanding the accommodation of existing ones, it is clear that the Government’s sentencing policies make it very unlikely that it will ever build sufficient prison places, thereby cementing our reputation as the country in Europe which imprisons the highest proportion of out people.
Thanks to Andy Aitchison for kind permission to use the header image in this post. You can see Andy’s work here
