Our advice to the new Minister for Prisons, Catherine McKinnell (the 13th in 10 years) is to see the prison capacity crisis as an opportunity.
Previous early release schemes have not worked to free up prison places. Recalls to prison for breaches of tightly drawn licence conditions are up 28% this year, to 51,500, largely as a result of previous early release schemes.
You can do the same thing and get the same result, or you can use this latest crunch point to make the prison system more effective, cut the burden on the taxpayer, speed up justice and keep us all safe.
The country knows you must do something – now. So fix it, don’t fudge it.
Where to start:
Recalls: Release the roughly 9,400 people currently in prison for breaching their probation licence. There are cheaper, more effective ways to respond to people missing appointments.
Around 14% of the prison population (12,000 people) are in prison because they have breached a condition of their licence on release. Of these, only 22% have committed a further offence. That leaves around 9,400 people in prison purely on recall.
Where a breach is serious, people can be recalled for the whole remaining term of their sentence. Someone given a seven-year sentence and released after serving 40% could therefore be recalled for more than four years. But the majority are recalled for 56 days.
What’s the point?
As Rory Stewart said of short sentences when he was Prisons Minister, they are “long enough to cause harm by leading to the loss of housing, relationships and employment but not long enough to facilitate change”.
Organisations like us work hard to put the conditions that facilitate change in place on release. Ripping all that hard work and opportunity away – often on a technicality – only to start again from scratch four months later is pointless. We, and our philanthropic funders, could be forgiven for questioning why we bother.
Recalls are also cripplingly expensive for the taxpayer. Add the instability and chaos they create for prison staff trying to run safe prisons and the policy becomes impossible to justify given both the lack of prison space and the state of the national finances.
There need to be consequences for breaching a probation licence. Tighten the terms, extend the period – but don’t fill the equivalent of five prisons with people who couldn’t stick to the small print of their licences.
Most licences are drawn up at the last minute – on the day of release, or in the days immediately beforehand – and can be incredibly easy to fall foul of.
Last week, we had a work-ready candidate who had to attend a meeting with his probation officer but was also forbidden by his licence from entering the area where the probation office was located. Either way, he was going to be recalled to prison.
Remands: Look at releasing many of the 15,000 people currently on remand – people who remain innocent in the eyes of the law but are taking up prison places because they cannot get in front of a judge and jury.
You can tag them, put them on Home Detention Curfew, or make release conditional on compliance with other requirements. But people should not be locked up for years because we cannot get them into court.
Nor should the taxpayer pick up the £50/60,000-a-year bill for keeping them there while they wait for their day in court.
They could be working, living at home, paying their own bills and looking after their children.
It’s a fourfold whammy: we pay to lock them up; we pay to build new prisons to compensate for the space they occupy; we lose the contribution they could be making to society through work and tax; and we pay to support the families they would otherwise be supporting.
Some people do need to be remanded in custody – perpetrators of domestic violence, child abuse and so on. But there are other ways of managing lower-risk defendants while they wait to be tried.
People are now spending years on remand. Heaven help you if the Crown Prosecution Service has to evidence a trial where you are just one of multiple defendants.
Black people spend, on average, more than 300 days on remand, compared with 172 days for white people. Around a third of people remanded in custody will not be convicted at trial.
They usually go back “home” to a life that has unravelled in the meantime.
We should all care about the injustice of our justice system: we built it, we pay for it – several times over – and we could all find ourselves in it, whether as a defendant or a victim.
There is a backlog of around 80,000 trials in the Crown Court. Cases are now routinely being scheduled for 2029, with some as late as 2030.
Justice is now so slow in this country that if you are accused of a crime carrying a sentence of under four years, you may be out of prison sooner if you plead guilty – even if you are not – take the initial 33% discount on your sentence and bank on an early release scheme letting you out after serving 40% of the remainder.
Would you hold out for “justice”? Or would you take certainty and the opportunity to get on with your life?
We could establish emergency courts to clear the easier cases — getting people sentenced or released.
Those who defend the “right” to trial by jury should weigh that against the injustice of imprisoning unconvicted people for years, and the absurdity of people serving just 40% of their sentences because our prisons are full.
At the moment, all the pressure is on prison staff to work out who can be released this week and on probation to manage the resulting chaos. The pressure should be shared with the courts, CPS and police.
IPP prisoners: I met a man not long ago on the mental health wing of HMP Swaleside who was rippled head to toe with the scars of self-harm. He was an IPP prisoner.
Supposed to serve two years, he had been in prison for 17 years, with no clear mechanism for proving that he was no longer a threat to society and did not need to be detained indefinitely for “public protection”.
Now in his 40s, he was no longer the person who had been sentenced in his 20s.
Nor was he in a mental or physical condition to rebuild his life.
I cannot begin to imagine the despair of not knowing if or when you will be released.
IPP prisoners are among the most prolific self-harmers and are disproportionately represented in prison suicides. The sentence was abolished 14 years ago because it was recognised as unjust and cruel. Yet around 2,500 people are still indefinitely detained in our prisons.
These are not necessarily murderers or rapists – if they were, they would have a fixed tariff and a release date. They are often people who repeatedly got into trouble: the person who starts a fight every Saturday night in the pub.
They messed up – repeatedly. But so did we.
They have done their time. It is time to release them.
Short sentences: Despite courts being asked not to hand down sentences of under 12 months, there are currently around 6,000 people serving short sentences.
As Rory Stewart pointed out when he was Prisons Minister “The best way of protecting the public is to reduce significantly, if not eliminate, the under 12-month prison population.”
Women: Around 1,400 women are in prison for non-violent offences. Most pose no threat to society.
If we have no cell space for Jessie Cole and Albert Bowers, who were involved in the killing of Police Officer Andrew Harper, we certainly have no space for women who have committed non-violent offences.
This is a systemic problem
Prison overcrowding is not just a “prison issue”. It is a systemic and societal issue.
You will not solve it with another early release scheme. Lord Timpson tried that – and here we are again.
We have twice as many people in prison as many of our European neighbours. Does the average Brit have twice the criminal intent of the average German? No.
Is Germany as safe as Britain? Yes.
So what are we doing building and paying for all these extra prisons — at a cost of £10 billion to build and billions more to run?
Lest we forget, our National Debt is nearly, £3,000,000,000 and £10 Billion would pay Septembers interest… Can we have practical policies we can actually afford?
We are here because we have crippled the courts, so we cannot deliver justice quickly enough. That has created a huge remand population in prison.
We are here because we have crippled the courts so we can’t deliver justice quickly enough, hence we have a huge remand population in prison. Justice delayed is justice denied. Cutting back on spending historically is costing us dearly now.
We have starved the probation service of resources, so we have lost confidence in our ability to effectively monitor people in the community and continually resort to the “recall button”.
We recalled 51,500 people to prison last year — in a prison population of around 85,000. For many people, monitoring in the community is much cheaper and leads to less reoffending than prison, as highlighted by David Gauke’s Independent Sentencing Review 2025.
We have also slashed prison budgets, leaving prisons unable to rehabilitate people and instead managing crisis after crisis.
Sixty to seventy percent of prisoners have been to prison before. You would close any hospital or school with the same failure rate. A business would be long gone.
And we have massively increased sentence lengths. They are up by 60% in the last 20 years, because policymakers know that tougher sentences are popular with voters.
The truth is that this makes us no safer — and costs an arm and a leg.
And all this is happening in the context of crime, particularly violent and property crime, falling by 90% over the last 30 years.
So what should we do?
Amber Rudd is about to conduct a “review” (I hear the cans rattling down the road) into making prisons safer, tackling crime and “delivering long term reform that protects the public”.
Amber, prisons will be safer if they have fewer people in them, so prison officers can run decent, rehabilitative regimes that do not lead to more reoffending.
Crime is still falling. Thank the police — and tell the public.
We will all be safer if we properly fund the Probation Service to monitor people in the community, and organisations like us to help them into work. That is cheaper than building more prisons — and safer.
And justice needs to be faster — to be fair to both victims and defendants, and to stop our prisons filling up with people awaiting trial.
We would not risk headlines about releasing convicted dangerous criminals early when we could free up thousands of prison cells by releasing people who have not yet been convicted of any crime, people imprisoned for licence breaches, people detained long beyond what was intended by the courts, and women who have, time and time again, been victims of crimes far more serious than those they are accused of committing.
And perhaps we would start by listening to the people who actually run our prisons. I was speaking to an Area Executive Director recently – someone with 39 years’ experience in the prison service – who wondered why politicians never come to speak to him and his Governors before deciding who should be released. I shared some of the ideas in this article with him. His response was simple: “Exactly.”
This piece was written by Beating Time’s founder and Chair of Trustees.