A former prisons inspector has urged ministers to abandon plans to build more jails and instead redirect the funds to public services that could help keep people out of the justice system.
Nick Hardwick, who was HM inspector of prisons from 2010 to 2016, said the Labour government should scrap plans to spend £4bn on expanding prison places.
The plans, instigated under the former Conservative administration, include building six new prisons and adding 14,000 prison places to the 89,000 across the existing estate.
They are a response to an overcrowding crisis that has been growing in recent years. Days before the 4 July election, the Prison Governors’ Association warned that the criminal justice system was "on the precipice of failure" and that a shortfall of prison places could endanger the public by leaving violent criminals on the streets. The Institute for Government then warned that the incoming administration would have “just days” to avert a major crisis in the prison service.
Speaking to the Guardian, Hardwick said: “The basic problem is that people are coming into the system faster than they are going out. If you think of it like a bath, the bath is overflowing and water is still coming in.
“The strategy has been up until now – and what Labour is continuing to do – is bail out the bath… That will certainly buy them some time. But it doesn’t solve the problem completely. The system is set to continue to increase,” he said.
Hardwick, who was also head of the Parole Board between 2016 and 2018, said cash allocated to the Ministry of Justice to expand its prisons estate would be better used on other services.
He told the newspaper: “Labour have said they were going to spend billions, literally billions, on new prisons. But if they bought themselves a bit of time, would it be better to reinvest that money in trying to stop people going into prison in the first place – working in schools, in health, in mental health?
“You could ask people: do you want people to go to prison for a few months longer at a cost of billions of pounds, or spend that money on hospitals and schools?”
The government announced emergency measures to deal with prison overcrowding in England and Wales shortly after taking power in the general election, including early release for some prisoners who had served 40% of their sentence.
But a series of riots across England this month has added more pressure on prisons, with more than 1,000 arrests made. The prime minister, Keir Starmer, has said he expects swift sentencing to "send a very powerful message to anybody involved" in inciting violence either in person or online.
Hardwick said he thought prison was “right for those involved in the riots, and the speed at which this was done – in contrast to how the system usually works – will be a deterrent”.
But he added: “I think the system will cope until [the end of] August provided there are no more crises but in the longer term, the current prison population is unsustainable without billions being spent. And even then I don’t think the new places can be delivered in time to deal with the sustained upward pressure in the population.”
“I don’t think it’s a good way to spend money to build big new prisons. We are spending billions on an untested model that we don’t know works. We’ve not run prisons of this size before.
“Even if in the longer run they work, by the nature of these prisons they will have new, inexperienced staff, so you are going to have real problems in some of them, I think. You might want to replace some of the crumbling Victorian ruins. But I think they need to think very carefully about whether they want to invest at this level given how short of money they are and put that money somewhere else.”
Upon becoming PM, Starmer said he was "shocked" at the extent of the overcrowding crisis.
The following day, former justice secretary Alex Chalk admitted that the Sunak administration had opted to kick the prisons crisis into the long grass because of the general election, telling BBC Radio 4's Today programme: "You have to win votes. And that was the calculus that was taxing the prime minister and others."
A Ministry of Justice spokesperson said: “This government is committed to addressing the crisis in our prisons, and ensuring our jails make better citizens, not better criminals.
“That has started with the emergency capacity measures introduced by the lord chancellor last month, and we will set out a 10-year strategy for prison supply later this year. We will also introduce a new focus on driving down reoffending, linking up prison governors with local employers to break the cycle of crime.”