The truth about Britain’s overcrowded prisons

Former justice secretary David Gauke’s Independent Sentencing Review (ISR), running since October, was not due to report until the spring. However, following the latest published prison population statistics, which showed there are only just over 1,000 spaces left in men’s prisons and soaring numbers for serious further offences, an interim report has been published. It makes for revolutionary reading. As Gauke says, he is confronting ‘the consequences of decades of haphazard policy making and underinvestment in the criminal justice system – bringing it to the brink of collapse.’

The report is brutal, tearing into the entire political narrative around crime and justice over the past thirty years. Gauke claims that the ISR found that a ‘belief that longer incarceration is the only effective means of punishment has left the system overwhelmed and ineffective’. He acknowledges, ‘that the rise in the prison population cannot be attributed to a considered strategy focused on cutting crime’.