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The most senior former judges in England and Wales have urged the government to reverse a more than 40-year trend of imposing longer sentences to help resolve the crisis in prisons.
In a paper published on Friday, four surviving former Lord Chief Justices and a former head of criminal justice said overcrowding had rendered prisons “not fit for purpose” and called for a wholesale review of sentencing policy.
This should include offering accelerated routes out of custody for people already serving lengthy jail time, said Lord Harry Woolf, Lord Nick Phillips, Lord John Thomas, Lord Ian Burnett and Sir Brian Leveson in the paper published by the Howard League for Penal Reform, a charity.
The call comes days before Sir Keir Starmer’s government begins to release about 2,000 prisoners under temporary emergency measures reducing the proportion of some custodial sentences from 50 per cent to 40 per cent.
Ministers set out the plans this summer in a bid to ease the pressures on a prison estate that the prime minister said was close to “breaking point”.
But former Lord Chief Justices Woolf, Phillips, Thomas and Burnett, and former head of criminal justice Leveson, said the move did not go far enough.
“While much of the discussion of the crisis has focused on urgent remedial measures, the primary cause of prison overcrowding in 2024 is decades of sentence inflation,” said Phillips, who was the most senior judge in England and Wales between 2005 and 2008 and chair of the group.
“If prisons are to become places . . . where prisoners can receive the support and interventions needed to return safely to the community and desist from offending, there needs to be a fundamental shift in the drivers of sentencing policy,” he added.
The criminal justice system has been under intense strain for more than a decade as a result of budget cuts and sharp increases in average sentences.
The Howard League paper noted that while custodial sentences had more than doubled in the half century the former judges had been involved in the law, there was no evidence that longer sentences had contributed to reducing crime.
The population behind bars in England and Wales has more than doubled since Michael Howard, then Conservative home secretary, introduced more aggressive criminal justice policies, declaring in 1993 that “prison works”.
Tougher sentencing under successive Labour and Tory governments means England and Wales now have the highest imprisonment rate in western Europe, locking up 145 people for every 100,000.
As of last Friday there were 88,350 prisoners in England and Wales, compared with an operational capacity in the entire estate of 89,543.
The paper noted that, on current trends, the number of prisoners would rise to between 94,600 and 114,800 by March 2028 — a situation the former judges labelled “unacceptable,” warning that Britain could not build enough jail [spaces] to meet such demand.
Tom Wheatley, head of the Prison Governors Association, a representative body, backed the former judges’ call for a reversal of sentencing trends.
“We think that the influx of people in custody after the riots last month mean that we won’t get anywhere near the 18 months [reprieve the government was expecting] and will be lucky to reach 12,” he said.
The Ministry of Justice said the government had inherited a system “with prisons on the point of collapse” and already “taken action to make sure we can continue to . . . protect the public and reduce reoffending”.
The department added that it would launch a review of sentencing by the end of the year and carefully consider the Howard League paper.
