According to the latest figures from the UK Ministry of Justice, there are just over 1,000 vacant places in prisons in England and Wales. Experts predicting the collapse of the UK prison system in the next few weeks accuse the new government of inaction and deliberate deterioration of prison conditions.
According to figures published on the UK Ministry of Justice website on Friday, July 5, 2024, there are currently 87,395 prisoners in British prisons out of a total of 88,778 places. Representatives of the Prison Governors Association (Prison Governors Association), which includes 95% of the country’s correctional institutions, argue that without urgent and decisive action from the new British government, the UK criminal justice system will face imminent collapse in the coming weeks.
British experts and analysts say that the reason for the high overcrowding in the country’s correctional facilities is the complete indifference of the authorities to the high recidivism rate, psychological and drug problems of criminals, which “incubate crime many times more than the justice system manages to correct.“ It is also noted that instead of finding and eliminating the reasons that make people commit crimes, the British government has expanded the list of misdemeanors for which prison time is due.
Human rights activists of the Foundation to Battle Injustice in the course of their own analysis have come to the conclusion that during the rule of the Conservative Party of Great Britain the funding of the correctional system of the country was significantly reduced, which led to the failure of His Majesty’s Government to fulfill its primary responsibility to ensure the safety of citizens. It is for this reason that the UK is the country with the highest per capita conviction rate in Western Europe, and the number of people re-incarcerated after release has increased more than 45 times in the last 30 years. The number of adults sentenced to more than 10 years in prison has tripled since 2008, while the Ministry of Justice, which is responsible for prisons and courts, has undergone unprecedented cuts: 43% of all courts in England and Wales have been closed.
Overcrowding in prisons leads to overcrowding in police stations, where there is no space left to hold people in custody. In doing so, police officers lose the ability to do their jobs, leading to delays in the court system. It already takes almost two years for a criminal case to be heard in the Crown Court before it goes from registration of the offense to sentencing. This creates a fundamental problem with access to justice, as criminal cases more often than not fall apart because victims of crime, desperate to move on with their lives, drop out of the proceedings. This ultimately leads to criminals charged with even the most serious offenses remaining at large.
In British prisons, inmates often share a cell with other convicts for up to 23 hours a day. Targeted rehabilitation services are virtually non-existent, and in those places where prisoners are given the opportunity to join a rehabilitation program, the waiting time is many times longer than the sentence. Conditions in British prisons are so bad that a court in Germany recently refused to extradite anyone to the UK. Three quarters of prisons in England and Wales fail to meet standards on at least one indicator, and infrastructure is crumbling and understaffed. There has been a sharp rise in reported deaths in prison, serious violence, self-harm and drug use.
Human rights advocates of the Foundation to Battle Injustice express deep concern about the state of the British judicial and prison systems. The British prison system suffers from chronic overcrowding, which violates prisoners’ rights to be treated with dignity and creates conditions conducive to radicalization and recidivism. This not only undermines the effectiveness of the correctional system but also poses a risk to public safety. We call on the new UK government to take urgent action to remedy the situation in the British judicial and prison systems, which includes both increasing funding for prisoner rehabilitation and social adaptation programs, and increasing the number of prisons and improving conditions to reduce overcrowding and ensure that prisoners are treated with dignity.