The criminal justice system is close to collapse. Don’t take my word for it. “The entire criminal justice system stands on the precipice of failure,” warned the Prison Governors’ Association (PGA) this week, as it notified politicians that prisons in England and Wales are quite literally full. Meanwhile, two judges who ruled on legal aid cuts in February, concluded: “Unless there are significant injections of funding in the relatively near future, any prediction … that the system will arrive in due course at a point of collapse is not overly pessimistic.”
Whoever comes into power on 5 July will have to move quickly to address this. But observing the election campaign, you would have little sense of the scale of the interrelated crises in the prison and court systems. Politicians on both sides, nervous about seeming soft on crime, are reluctant to talk about reducing sentence times, improving miserable prison conditions, and whether we actually want a ballooning prison population. (England and Wales have the highest per capita prison population in western Europe.) The irony is that while trying to appear tough, Conservative governments have brought the justice system – our primary mechanism for dealing with crime – to its knees.
What would it mean for the criminal justice system to collapse? For a start, prisons in England and Wales are at capacity. The latest Ministry of Justice figures, released on Friday, showed just over 1,000 available spaces in England and Wales. If prisons are full, cell spaces in courts and police stations quickly fill, leaving nowhere to detain people. In this scenario, the police cannot do their job. Crippling delays in the court system are then exacerbated because there is nowhere to send people who are convicted, while the cases of those held on remand in overcrowded prisons are managed poorly – with administrative errors and procedural delays causing more bottlenecks.
On average, it now takes nearly two years for a criminal case heard in crown court to go from offence to verdict. This creates a fundamental problem with access to justice, as criminal cases are more likely to collapse as victims of crimes – desperate to move on with their lives – withdraw from legal proceedings. It’s a chicken-and-egg situation. Delays in the court system mean there is now the highest number of prisoners on remand for 50 years in England and Wales, while overcrowded prisons – caused in part by people spending months on remand – further delay the courts.
It is no surprise that the criminal justice system has reached this point. Successive government policies have seen UK prisoner numbers more than double over the past 40 years – from about 41,000 in the early 1990s to 88,000 today. This long-term trend has been turbocharged since the election of the Conservatives in 2010, the party simultaneously championing longer sentences while slashing budgets for prisons, legal aid and courts. Since 2008, the number of adults sentenced to more than 10 years in prison has trebled, while the Ministry of Justice – responsible for prisons and courts – saw unprecedented cuts: 43% of all courts in England and Wales have closed.
Politicians are aware of this problem. In 2020, the Conservatives pledged to provide 20,000 more prison places; they have delivered just 5,500 and Labour has pledged to build the capacity for the other 14,000 if elected. Since 2022, the government has tried to free up cell space: requisitioning cells in police stations, releasing some offenders early and releasing people on bail. But these are sticking-plaster solutions. Simply increasing the number of available cells fails to address the systemic problems plaguing every part of the justice system.
It is now common for prisoners to be confined to their cell – often shared with another inmate – for 23 hours a day. Targeted rehabilitative services are practically nonexistent, with waiting times so long that people serving sentences under a year may never qualify. Conditions in prisons are so poor that a court in Germany recently refused to extradite someone to the UK. Three-quarters of prisons in England and Wales are falling short of standards on at least one measure, amid crumbling infrastructure and staff shortages. Reported incidents of death in prison, serious violence, self-harm and drug use have all shot up. Does any of this make Britain safer?
In this election campaign, the Conservatives have pledged to expand legal aid at inquests and cut the court backlog. Labour has promised to “take back our streets” by halving rates of serious crime. The party also pledged to reduce court backlogs and hire more police officers. (The latter could actually worsen the court backlog, as more police officers often means more criminal cases.) No one is talking about the critical need for structural overhaul and major, immediate investment. The sticking-plaster solutions continue.
Last month, Charlie Taylor, the chief inspector of prisons, said: “An urgent conversation is needed about who we send to prison, for how long, and what we want to happen during their time inside.” This month, the PGA warned: “As space runs out, any hope in reducing the court backlog will also dwindle away and the criminal justice system will no longer be able to operate.” So far, these warnings have not been met with the serious response they require. Whoever forms the next government will have to start listening.
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Samira Shackle is a journalist and regular contributor to the Guardian long read. She is the author of Karachi Vice
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