By U.K. Parliament. House of Commons. Committee of Public Accounts

The Ministry of Justice’s (MoJ’s) and HM Prison and Probation Service’s (HMPPS’s) failure to increase prison capacity in line with demand has led to a prison estate in crisis. Their plans to deliver 20,000 additional prison places in England and Wales by the mid–2020s have been delayed by approximately five years until 2031, and will cost at least £4.2 billion more than planned. MoJ’s and HMPPS’s original plans were unrealistic and they did not work effectively with others in Government to address delivery risks. As at September 2024, HMPPS had delivered just 6,518 additional places, and its plans to deliver the remaining 14,000 are still subject to significant risk. The Lord Chancellor, in her December 2024 announcement of MoJ’s 10–year prison capacity strategy, emphasised the continued need for prison places, as it projected the prison population to increase by an average of 3,000 annually over the coming years. As a result of poor planning and delays, the adult male prison estate was operating at 98.0% to 99.7% occupancy between October 2022 and August 2024 and remains alarmingly full. Overcrowding is endemic, staff are overburdened, and access to services and purposeful activity is poor. The current prison system has had to focus on ensuring there are sufficient places to house prisoners. While the efforts of HMPPS staff to avert disaster are admirable, this state of crisis undermines their efforts to rehabilitate prisoners and reduce reoffending. It also represents poor value for money for the taxpayer, with MoJ and HMPPS unable to make sufficient progress on maintaining existing cells, and needing to rent police cells due to a lack of capacity. MoJ and HMPPS have relied on the early release of prisoners to prevent total gridlock in the criminal justice system. Despite releasing thousands of prisoners early, MoJ still forecasts it will run out of capacity by early 2026. It is relying on the ongoing independent Sentencing Review to prevent this. However, any decisions to divert more people from prison will likely increase pressures on other parts of the system, particularly the Probation Service, which already has issues with staff shortages and high caseloads. This Committee has recently reported on the Crown Court backlog, which is significantly delaying access to justice. Courts and prisons cannot be viewed in isolation: creating sufficient capacity in prisons is vital to enabling a reduction in the courts backlog, and in turn if the courts backlog is reduced this will decrease the number of people on remand. If prisons continue to operate at near–full capacity, this will exacerbate the backlog and stymie efforts to improve efficiency in the justice system.  

London: House of Commons, 2025. 27p.

By Magnus Lofstrom and Brandon Martin, with research support from Sean Cremin

Key Takeaways: Since a 2009 federal court order to reduce prison overcrowding, California has been at the forefront of reforms aimed at reducing incarceration. One critical reform, Proposition 47—passed by voters in 2014— continues to be at the center of policy discussions. Under Prop 47, prison and jail populations plummeted as did arrests for drug and property crimes after certain offenses were reclassified from felonies to misdemeanors. Furthermore, lower prison populations and expenditures have led to $800 million so far in savings that provided funding for treatment and diversion programs. But Prop 47 may not be the most important change to the criminal justice system in recent years; the pandemic brought challenges that have had lasting impacts on incarceration and enforcement. Driven by larcenies, property crime jumped after Prop 47 compared to the nation and comparison states; with no further deviations until 2021, partly driven by commercial burglaries. Violent crime also diverged over the last decade, with the sharpest deviation at the start of the pandemic. Two years after Prop 47, California’s clearance rate—or reported crimes that lead to an arrest and referral to prosecution—for property crime dropped 3 percent. It then dropped 7 percent in 2022, signaling that a person is half as likely to be apprehended for property crime today, compared to 2014. The clearance rate for violent crime has remained relatively stable for two decades. Jail and prison populations have dropped by a total of 30 percent, but the impact on crime has been modest and limited. With Prop 47, only a rise in auto thefts (3.9%) and car break-ins (3.7%) is tied to lower incarceration; with the pandemic, it was a rise in auto thefts (1.6%) and commercial burglaries (2.1%). After Prop 47, lower clearance rates for larceny (theft without force or threat of force) led to a modest rise in property crime, with more burglaries (2.9%), auto thefts (1.7%), and larcenies (1.1%). After the pandemic, lower larceny clearance rates led to a rise in car accessory thefts (7.3%) and car break-ins (3.9%); burglary clearance rates also dropped, raising commercial burglaries (3.2%). No evidence suggests that changes in drug arrests after Prop 47 or after the pandemic led to any increases in crime. Due to data limitations, we were not able to assess whether Prop 47 or the pandemic led to any changes in substance use and addiction. Focusing on retail theft, fewer cleared property crimes after both Prop 47 and the pandemic led to a rise in commercial burglaries; a drop in the jail population post-pandemic is also tied to a rise in commercial burglaries. Evidence is clearer that retail theft increased due to pandemic responses by the criminal justice system, and the increases were of greater magnitude than increases due to Prop 47. This report builds on our previous research and is the culmination of a year-long effort to examine the impact of Proposition 47 as the reform approaches its 10th anniversary, as well as the impact of the pandemic-related criminal justice responses; it is not an analysis of recently enacted or proposed legislation or upcoming ballot initiatives such as Proposition 36. Determining the factors that can reverse falling rates for cleared property crimes—and in turn raise the likelihood of being apprehended—should be a top priority for California’s policymakers. Legislators also should seek evidence-based alternatives to incarceration, which shows limited success with preventing crime. Understanding these factors and alternatives is vital to developing criminal justice policies, especially as research consistently finds that increasing the likelihood of being apprehended is a more effective strategy for preventing crime than harsher penalties or longer sentences.

San Francisco: Public Policy Institute of California, 2024. 35p.

By The Howard League for Penal Reform

Over the half-century that we have been involved in the law, custodial sentence lengths have approximately doubled and the same is true of prison numbers. The connection between the two is obvious. Over time, the growing prison population has outstripped safe and decent accommodation. As a consequence, prison overcrowding prevents the rehabilitation that should take place to reduce reoffending. There is nothing that justifies this doubling of sentence lengths. Government legislation relating to sentencing has consistently provided that imprisonment should only be imposed if there is no suitable alternative punishment, and that imprisonment should be for the minimum period commensurate with the crime. The law dictates this. The problem is that there is no objective measure for deciding what term of imprisonment is commensurate with a particular offence. Nor have governments always been content to leave it to the judges to decide the appropriate sentence. Instead they have intervened piecemeal, by securing legislation to impose minimum sentences where crimes, typically murder, are committed in specified circumstances that are seen as aggravating the offence. The result of such interventions has been to raise the level of sentences imposed across the board, as judges, with guidance from the Sentencing Council, seek to maintain a consistent scale of punishment. The only purposes of sentencing which are served by longer sentences are punishment and, in some instances, the protection of the public. But punishment does not stop reoffending and is expensive. It currently costs about £50,000 to imprison an adult for a year.

London: The Howard League for Penal Reform, 2024. 14p.