Overcrowding In Prisons

One of the chief factors contributing to the ‘crisis’ in prison is the overcrowding of prisoners. Indeterminate sentences and increased use of long determinate sentences are key drivers behind the near doubling of prison numbers; almost doubling from 1993 9% to 2014 17%. Bromley Briefing Prison Factfile (2015) reveals cost of our ‘addiction to imprisonment’ in wasted time, money and lives. High security prisons are not filled to capacity, whereas local prisons are concentrated with overcrowding. The majority of these prisoners in local prisons are that of on remand and short term sentences. In October 2006, 62% of prisons were overcrowded, 12 prisons containing more than half as many as they should (Cavadino and Dignan, p.17). As a result of
overcrowding, currently 18,000 prisoners are sleeping two to a cell designed for a single inmate, while others are kept in cells in police stations and courthouses. Overcrowding is likely to threaten safety and have multiple other serious adverse effects on prison conditions and regimes (Prison Reform Trust, 2006). 20,000 additional prison places were created between 1997 and 2006, yet 2006 saw the prisons yet again bursting at the seams (c&D, p.113). Prison policy and legislation changes (including mandatory minimum custodial sentences for a second offence of knife possession) place an upward pressure of prison population, and The Ministry of Justice’s figures show that 2/3 of the rise in prison population between 1993 and 2012 has been driven by greater use of long custodial sentences. Average prison sentence is now 4 months longer than 20 years ago.
Use of community sentences has nearly halved despite being cheaper and more effective than a short prison sentence at reducing offending The government has begun to make use of electronic tagging conditionally to release short and medium-term prisoners earlier than would otherwise have been the case. If this scheme is extended, and the current prison building programme continues, then system overcrowding would be eliminated and the Service would have the room to manoeuver that it had briefly in the early 1990s (ITAT). Significant differences between the male and female prisoner populations. A higher proportion of women prisoners are on remand and this in spite of the fact that female prisoners typically spend a shorter period awaiting trial than males. A significantly lower proportion of females remanded in custody pre-trial do not subsequently receive a custodial sentence, which prompts the question as to whether so many need have been remanded in the first place. ITAT. Women as less likely to have been convicted for offences of violence. This has prompted several commentators to argue that very many fewer women still should be in prison (Carlen,
1998).