The rising prison population after last summer's riots combined with budget cuts are putting jails under serious pressure which "cannot go on idefinitely", the chief inspector of prisons has warned.
Nick Hardwick, the independent arbiter on jail conditions in England and Wales, said governors were being put in a very hard position.
“We are asking prisons to do a very difficult thing,” he said in an interview with the Financial Times.
“On the one hand numbers are going up and money is going down. And we’re saying, on top of that, we want you to do more [to prevent reoffending]. I think actually that’s not an unreasonable ask for a period of time . . . but I don’t think that can go on indefinitely.”
Prisons are operating at 98 per cent capacity after the jail population hit a high of 88,179 in December.
Nearly 1,000 rioters have been given custodial sentences, lasting on average four times longer than those awarded for similar crimes in 2010.
MoJ officials insist the crush will ease when two new prisons open next month, however the chief inspector said there was a “critical issue” about how fast the population rose in the interim.
“Can the rise be slow enough so that it doesn’t reach 100 per cent before the new [prisons] come on?” he said. “What we don’t know is whether the rise. . . is a hump that arises from the riots that will work its way through the system . . . or whether that’s a long-term trend.”
Mr Hardwick said his key concern was that in crowded prisons, the programmes intended to reduce reoffending as part of the government’s vaunted “rehabilitation revolution” come under strain.
“The question is, what do you do with people once they’re there?” he said. “Do you have enough space to keep people occupied, and are you making best use of it? The programmes you’re doing to address people’s behaviour – have you enough of those?”
At the centre of the drive to break the offending cycle – and in doing so, to reduce prison demand by more than 2,500 places in three years – is the idea that prisoners should be working a 40-hour week. Ken Clarke, justice secretary, has said he wants to see a profitmaking company in every prison, staffed by inmates who earn a wage and contribute to the economy.
However, the chief inspector said that for many prisons, this ambition is far from the reality. When he inspected Wandsworth prison last year, he was impressed to see that it had a workshop run by Timpson, the shoe repair business, but that it was half empty because the prison could not organise people to get from the cells to the workshop.
“In a sense, the work was an afterthought,” Mr Hardwick said. “You got the impression it was the least important thing the prison was doing. So people had to go to the gym, they had to do other things, unlike in normal life where you fit those things around work. . . you have to make work a more central objective of what the prisoner is there for.”
He said companies found the bureaucracy of running a business in prison “very frustrating” – which jails needed to address. “Businesses that provide work in prisons need to be treated as customers, and we need to make it as easy as possible for them to do their work,” Mr Hardwick said.
Not so far away from prison hulks on the Thames again.
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