Why Building More Cells Won’t Solve the UK’s Prison Crisis

Prisons are at a breaking point, with overcrowding bottlenecking services, straining mental health and lowering overall standards throughout the UK. We recently held The Prisoner Health and Wellbeing Conference, where industry leaders came together to explore prisoner wellbeing. In attendance was Andrew Neilson, Director of Campaigns at The Howard League for Penal Reform. His keynote session explored prison capacity – the biggest thing impacting the prison system at the moment. Most people assume that the answer to this is to just simply build more prisons, but Nielson underlines how this issue is much more complex than that.

The Howard League is a prison charity working for less crime, safer communities and fewer people in prison. They are named after the 18th century prison reformer, John Howard, who is believed to be the first person to investigate the standards in prisons. The charity conducts high quality research, campaigns for policy changes and engages with media and politicians to try and bring change to the prison system. Their work focuses on improving the criminal justice system by challenging unnecessary arrests, supporting individuals in prison, transforming prison conditions and promoting effective community interventions. They are clearly experts in what they do and their passion for change shines through in the work they do.

Setting the scene

Nielson began his session giving the audience some contextual statistics. As of September, there were around 88,000 people in prison in England and Wales. The Howard League believes that the prison estate should not hold more than 81,000 people, meaning that overall the prison system is almost 10% over capacity.

As you can see, the number of people in prison has rapidly increased in the last 80 years. Nielson explains how sentence inflation, which is where people are going to prison for more reasons and for longer than ever before, is creating a trajectory that the prison system cannot keep up with. This is leading to overcrowding situations which can mean two men sharing a cell designed for one, or even three men sharing a cell designed for two people. This has a wide range of physical and psychological implications. On the physical side, there is less room, which can increase transmission of diseases, poor hygiene and sleep deprivation. On the psychological side, overcrowding in cells will lead to a lack of privacy, a higher rate of fights due to frustrations over space and can lead prisoners to feel dehumanised and powerless.

All of this is despite the introduction of SDS 40, which came into effect in September 2024. This is a temporary government policy that allows eligible prisoners to be released after serving 40% of their sentence, rather than the standard 50%. This is something that The Howard League pushed for, so it was a victory for the charity.

Nielson then explored how the number of people in UK prisons differs from other nations. Whilst population numbers cannot be compared directly due to geographical and population differences, The Howard League can work it out by using the Prison Population Rate (PPR). You can work out this number by seeing how many prisoners there are per every 100,000 citizens. In England and Wales, the PPR is 143/100k. In France it is 109/100k and Germany is 67/100k. The figures get even lower in Scandinavia, with Norway being 52/100k and Finland at 51/100k. England and Wales have the highest number of prisoners than any of our near neighbours.

For a bit of perspective, the USA has an eye-watering 531 prisoners per 100,000 people!

Why is this? Nielsen explains that countries with a lower PPR are more likely to use fines, community service, probation and suspended sentences much more than England and Wales. Additionally, these countries have a strong focus on rehabilitation, reintegration and treating prisoners with dignity in an effort to prepare inmates to return successfully to society, resulting in less people repeat offending. The Howard League believes that England and Wales need to use similar practices, as keeping people out of prisons doesn’t just help relieve the stress of prison capacity, it also means there are more people contributing to society.

Setting the scene

In the next section of his session, Nielson gave a case study to highlight what prison life is like in the UK at the moment. He used Bedford prison as an example. According to the Howard League’s Website, Bedford prison is currently at 142% capacity. In November 2023, the prison received an urgent notification from inspectors, which essentially means that the conditions are not acceptable. Inspectors found that Bedford prison had the highest levels of violence against staff and the third highest rate of self-harm in any male prison in the country at the time. It was also noted that there was a worrying amount of excessive violence and unprofessional behaviour from staff.

Furthermore, three quarters of prisoners were living in overcrowded conditions and spending over 22 hours a day locked in their cells. The inspectors also found broken windows, black mould and an infestation of rats and cockroaches.

At this point, Nielson wanted to remind people:

“You are in and out of custody, perhaps for minor offenses, involving theft and shoplifting. You don’t have a job. You may have left school early, you’re perhaps living on the streets. You have a substance misuse problem, or you have poor mental health. Expecting somebody in that situation to become a better person, a law abiding citizen, by spending a few weeks lying on a prison bunk, doing nothing except trying to survive in an environment where drugs and violence are rife, is a kind of magical thinking.“ – Andrew Nielson

Indeed, prisons in these circumstances are actively making it more likely for people to re-offend, as they will make their issues worse, not better. As the vast majority of prisoners will re-enter society, it should be a major concern for everyone that these people have the opportunity to not only be punished for the crimes they have committed but that they are also helped to get better so they can re-join society safely and securely.

Nielson continued by highlighting how the violence levels in prisons are likely fuelled by how systems inside prisons have dropped in quality due to overcrowding. There might be less food to go around, less time to spend recreationally and less time for proper psychological safeguarding. If you are in a place like Bedford Prison, with mould on the walls, rats, broken windows and are being forced to share a cell that isn’t big enough, your mental health is naturally going to be strained.

This is a nationwide issue, as the annual prison performance ratings for 24/25 revealed that 22 out of the 122 prisons in England and Wales were given a rating of serious concern. Nielson noted that this is the largest number with that rating since these performance ratings have been published.

All of this highlights how prison life itself is systematically broken. Sentence inflation, and the lifestyles led in prisons currently are all about getting through, surviving, in an environment where the standards are degrading at an alarming rate. There is not enough effort to help prisoners become better people, to help them land on their feet after their sentence.

While women represent just a small proportion of those in custody, they face disproportionate harm, more complex needs, and a higher likelihood of being victims of serious violence, abuse, and coercion. To try and raise more awareness for this, we are hosting the Women in the Criminal Justice System Conference on the 16th of October.

The Response

A simple solution many assume is that England and Wales simply need more prisons. The Howard League disagrees for a few reasons. For one, at the current trajectory of people entering prisons, they’d need to build 4 large prisons every single year. This is simply impossible. These prisons would take up too much land, time and money. This would be money that could be funding other systems in the UK that are struggling, like the NHS. Indeed, in 2024 Shabana Mahmood, Secretary of State for the Home Department even stated that England and Wales:

“But we cannot build our way out of this crisis… The conclusion is clear: We have to do things differently.” – Shabana Mahmood, Twitter (14 May 2025)

Nielson then went on to discuss some proposed changes from the UK government which could help to reduce the number of people in prisons. One of the proposals is that judges should avoid sending people to prison for under one year unless absolutely necessary. The punishments, instead of prison time, could be community service, suspended sentences, electronic monitoring or deferred sentencing. This would put the England and Wales prison system closer to that of the German and Scandinavian processes, which have a much lower prison population. The Howard League agrees with this proposal, as often things like community service can be more beneficial for the criminals, whilst also punishing them and taking pressure off of cells.

It is clear that the UK government is aware of the prison crisis we are in, and are currently trying to tackle it. In 2023, The Howard League laid out a 5 year plan on how England and Wales can reform its prison system, aiming to help the government to fix the prison issue. With its five-year strategy, the Howard League believes the UK government could reduce the flow of people into the criminal justice system, promote more humane and rights-respecting approaches to justice (making custody a true last resort), and strengthen its own organisational capacity and influence so it can sustain independent, evidence-based advocacy.

“We believe the answers to crime lie not in the criminal justice system, but in a more fair and equitable society, one investing in education, housing, employment and health. We believe that everyone is better than their worst moment or decision, and that excessive punishment harms the fabric of society. We believe in second chances and in the ability of people to change.” – The Howard League for Penal Reform

The UK government appears to understand that they need to explore alternatives to just building more cells. This makes The Howard League and Nielson hopeful, but they understand that it’s going to take a lot of effort and a range of systematic changes to resolve this issue.

Overall, Nielson made it clear that the prison system is in desperate need of reform. A lot of the issues of overpopulation can be fixed by improving rehabilitation schemes for people leaving prison. Additionally, changes to what constitutes prison time could see the number drop drastically. Implementing the use of community service, suspended sentences and electronic tagging would see less strain in the prisons from people serving small sentences (a year or less). So whilst the easy answer is to build more prisons, these other changes would provide a massive difference.

We’d like to thank Andew Nielson for this keynote session. His experience at The Howard League and his knowledge of the prison system shone through in the interesting topics he discussed. The Women in the Criminal Justice System Conference is taking place on the 9th of December and will bring together industry leaders and experts to discuss how we can reduce reoffending and promote rehabilitation in the UK prison system.