Skip to main content

How to start reducing the prison population

Today we have published a briefing setting out eight pragmatic and incremental ways the government could begin to reduce the prison population without impacting public safety.

We estimate that these measures could reduce the population by 12,000 places over the lifetime of this parliament. This would reduce the pressure on the system, making it safer and freeing up to £900 million which could instead be spent on diverting people from the criminal justice system in the first place and providing effective rehabilitation services to prevent re-offending.

We propose the government focus on eight areas: recalls, remand, indeterminate sentences (IPP), sentence creep, short sentences, people experiencing mental health problems, women and black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) people.

The full briefing can be read here and a blog from our Director Nina Champion on this can be read here.