One of the first things Keir Starmer’s government did after coming into power in July 2024 was tweak sentencing rules so prisoners could be released earlier, to help relieve pressure on prisons.
Almost exactly two years later, history is repeating itself in the opening weeks of another Prime Minister’s term. As Andy Burnham faces the latest phase of the crisis, he’s proposed releasing more women prisoners early and tackling notorious indefinite IPP sentences.
But with this new controversy comes a new set of questions: who is really to blame this time?
If we’re seeking proper answers about how we ended up here, we’re going to have to confront something much deeper than regular politics.
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In 1993, the prison population for England and Wales was 44,000. By 2012, within less than 20 years, it had almost doubled to 87,000 – and it’s still hovering around that number around today.
So, what happened? Has criminality massively increased over that time?
No: the opposite. According to the Crime Survey of England and Wales, headline crime hit a high of 19,786 incidents in 1995 and has been on a clear downward trend since then.
The most recent CSEW stats from March this year show 9,615 headline incidents. If you remove fraud and computer misuse, which were far less prevalent in 1995 due to limited web access, it falls to 4,333 – less than a quarter of the 1995 level.
Less than a quarter. And yet, the prison population has doubled.
To work out what’s going on, let’s look at the Independent Sentencing Review which was commissioned by Labour after prisons briefly swerved disaster for the first time.
This found that there’s been a significant decline in the use of certain non-custodial sentences – such as community service – since 2010 and a significant increase in the length of the average custodial sentence.
Why? It’s ‘not the consequence of a considered strategy as the most effective measure to reduce crime’, the review says.
Instead, ‘sentencing has focused disproportionately on punishment’, with politicians and the media boosting the idea that ‘the only form of punishment that counts is imprisonment’.
The Sentencing Act 2026 aims to reverse some of those trends, but that broader attitude is more difficult to shake. When a crime takes place, it’s hard to think of a question other than: ‘How many years should this person be locked up?’
Breaking out of the prison crisis doom loop will require many of us to think again about what we want out of the justice system, and why it even exists in the first place.
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