Britain’s prisons are full. The solution has sparked outrage

For weeks, British media has thrummed with warnings from almost every group connected with the country’s criminal justice system. Probation officers are threatening strike action. Victims’ rights groups worry that victims aren’t adequately protected. Prison governors warn of prisons acting as a “revolving door.” Beset by persistent prison overcrowding, the criminal justice system in England and Wales is in the throes of a years-long crisis. And it has been thrust into the spotlight by a controversial measure starting Thursday which will see thousands of prisoners released early, simultaneously underscoring the urgency of the problem and the political minefield constraining any attempts to alleviate it. “You’re running the whole system hot, and that means there is no room for error,” said Pia Sinha, a former prison governor who now leads the Prison Reform Trust, a UK charity. “It’s kind of the equivalent of knowing you don’t have any hospital spaces and you’ve got an epidemic looming,” she told CNN, pointing out that any major event or riots would place near-unbearable pressure on prisons. For newly installed Prime Minister Andy Burnham, the public backlash to the policy represented his first real political test as he sought to balance criticism from grieving families with the realities on the ground. Current government figures estimate that prisons, which hovered somewhere between 97% and 98% capacity last month, will fill up by November without urgent action. The reforms were passed by the UK’s previous prime minister Keir Starmer who aimed to give the system some headroom. As part of this, most of those serving a standard prison sentence will be released earlier than initially planned. Adults convicted of less serious offences will be freed after a third of their sentence (rather than 40% or halfway through); others will be released after serving half of their sentence (instead of two thirds). Prisoners will be released “on license,” equivalent to being on parole, and those convicted of the most serious crimes are excluded from the reforms. “We’ve heard from victims who’ve become very unwell as a result of hearing that news,” said Claire Waxman, the independent Victims’ Commissioner for England and Wales, a government-appointed post which represents victims’ issues and advises ministers. “(They are) not able to work, struggling to live their life.” When Debbie Adlam was informed of the changes, she said she felt “sick.” Her son, PC Andrew Harper, had been married less than a month when he was killed in 2019 while trying to stop a quad bike theft. As he confronted the thieves, he became entangled in a tow strap hanging from their car and was dragged along the ground at speed for more than a mile. Three young men were convicted of manslaughter – one, who was driving the car, received a 16-year prison sentence while the other two received 13 years. Under the new rules, the latter two could have been released within months. “Andrew’s life doesn’t get to come back,” Adlam told Britain’s Telegraph newspaper in July, kickstarting an uproar. Burnham was eventually forced to backtrack on parts of the policy, excluding anyone convicted of manslaughter, death by dangerous driving and historic child sex offenses from early release to appease public anger. Even with Burnham’s changes, however, the probation officers’ union and victims’ rights groups say the system is ill-equipped to cope with an influx of offenders into the community, pointing to years of chronic underfunding and staffing pressures. Longer sentences Prison populations in the England and Wales have doubled over the past 30 years, according to the Institute for Government, a London-based think tank. Sentence lengths have increased in that time, keeping people behind bars for longer and outstripping the number of new prisons being built, even as overall crime rates have fallen during the last decade. At the same time, more people are being recalled to prison for breaching the terms of their parole, and more are held on remand, waiting to go to court. Although the judiciary determines individual sentences, politicians have always been able to influence that process by passing legislation which imposes more punitive penalties – a phenomenon criminologists refer to as “penal populism.” On average, the minimum term for murder cases has risen from 13 years in 2000 to 21 years in 2021, according to the Sentencing Council, the body which issues guidelines on sentencing for England and Wales. For other crimes, the average custodial sentence has risen from 13 months in 2005 to 21 months in 2023. “There is nothing which justifies this doubling of sentence lengths,” wrote five of the most senior former judges in England and Wales in 2024, referring to this trend. And between 2010 and 2024, when the Conservatives were in power and cut funding to public services following the 2008 financial crisis, just 500 net prison places were created. The Covid-19 pandemic only compounded the issue, creating a backlog for already stretched courts, forcing people to wait in prisons longer before their trial. Further prison building programs are planned but will take years to complete. ‘Instability all through the prison pipelines’ In the meantime, overcrowding “creates instability all through the prison pipelines, and then managing it safely becomes the only show in town,” said Sinha. Staff may have less time to properly assess prisoners, meaning they can be sent to less secure facilities, creating problems for management there. Mistakes are more likely to happen too. Between April 2024 and March 2025, 262 prisoners were released in error in England and Wales – the highest number on record and a 128% increase from the previous year. Meanwhile, prisoners increasingly end up spending more time in their cells, with less access to rehabilitative programs and more incentive to pass the time taking illicit drugs. That, in turn, is helping fuel much higher levels of violence towards prison staff. And with capacity so stretched, it is much harder to upgrade the crumbling Victorian-era prisons which are still an integral part of the prison infrastructure, said Sinha. During her time as governor of HMP Liverpool, in northwest England, between 2017 and 2020 she was able to reduce the number of prisoners there to “rebuild the prison wing by wing,” she recalls. “There is no such capacity now, so that’s the big fundamental difference … In 2017, you would call yourself overcrowded if you were 80% (capacity). It’s now 98%.” ‘How on earth am I going to cope?’ Any attempt to relieve the pressure on prisons shifts onto the probation service, which monitors offenders serving their sentence in the community. But the probation service is “heading for a complete meltdown,” warned Ian Lawrence, general secretary of NAPO, the union which represents probation officers. Their members overwhelmingly voted in favor of potential strike action in August over pay and increasing workloads. “Already without the early release scheme, workloads are at such a crescendo that we’ve never encountered before. Sickness is at all-time high,” Lawrence told CNN, noting that 60% of those off sick are suffering from burnout. “All the mood music among the members is ‘How on earth am I going to cope?’” he said. These crushing workloads create a “more risk averse culture,” Lawrence added, meaning officers are more likely to send offenders released on license back to prison. Although the government announced a £700 million (roughly $925 million) investment into the probation service and plans to recruit thousands more officers as part of its sentencing reforms, Lawrence cautions that those extra officers will need time to understand the complexities of the job. Such dysfunction is already contributing to very high rates of “victim attrition, where a victim reports and then withdraws their support for a prosecution,” says Waxman, the Victims’ Commissioner. It’s a trend she worries this scheme could accelerate, particularly if sentencing isn’t communicated properly. “We’re now hearing from victims saying ‘What is the point? Why am I going to have to wait years to go through the criminal justice system if the end result is that you will release the offender much earlier?’”