Focusing on education and training in prisons could save money in the long term

HMP Highpoint, a category C training and resettlement prison in Suffolk, will soon become the UK’s largest public sector prison, with three new blocks providing 700 new spaces. With a report out from the Public Accounts Committee  ¹⁹ https://committees.parliament.uk/publications/46985/documents/242927/default/  highlighting the ongoing capacity shortage in prisons, and its dire consequences, these new spaces are very welcome. But just as important is the emphasis that prisons minister Lord Timpson put on building workshops and training facilities as part of the expansion. This is a key step in the right direction to resolve the current crisis in prisons – and with commitment and investment up-front, could save money in the longer-term.  

Prison performance is at historic lows

Performance in prisons has been declining dramatically in recent years across a range of metrics, from skyrocketing violence to collapsing rates of ‘purposeful activity’, includes education, employment, rehabilitative courses and similar programmes. The pandemic totally shut down purposeful activity for many months, with prisoners in their cells for 23 hours a day or more. But the problem began long before the pandemic and continues to be a major issue even as restrictions have loosened.

The number of completed ‘accredited programmes’, which are rehabilitative courses like anger management and relationship skills, fell by more than 70% from 2009/10 to 2019/20, and was lower still in 2023/24  ²⁰ Ministry of Justice, Prison Education and Accredited Programme Statistics 2023 to 2024, 2024, https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/prison-education-and-accredited-programme-statistics-2023-to-2024  .  In the average prison, a third of prisoners are not taking part in any purposeful activity; in several prisons it is over half. 

Lack of training and employment in prison is probably contributing to high violence and poor outcomes

This drop in the amount of purposeful activity in prisons has gone hand-in-hand with rising rates of violence and protest. In our new report looking at performance across individual prisons, we see the same pattern. Controlling for a range of other factors like prison type and staffing levels, lower rates of participation in purposeful activity are strongly associated with higher rates of assault on prisoners and staff, and to a lesser extent with some forms of protest. A prison with eight out of 10 prisoners in purposeful activity has an estimated 40% fewer prisoner-on-prisoner assaults (per 1,000 prisoners) than an equivalent prison with six in 10 prisoners in purposeful activity.  ²¹ Rowland C and Pope T, Inside England and Wales’s prisons crisis: Performance Tracker Local, Institute for Government, 2025, https://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/publicatio n/performance-tracker-local/england-and-wales-prisons

Similarly, open prisons – which have the highest rates of purposeful activity participation of any prison type – also have the lowest rates of violence and protest. Some of this will be due to the kind of prisoners open prisons hold: all prisoners must be risk-assessed as suitable for open conditions and if they break the rules, they can be sent back to a higher-security facility. But this is unlikely to account for all the variation across different prisons, with some prisons with very similar prisoner cohorts performing much better or worse than others.

There are several reasons lower purposeful activity may drive higher violence. Prisoners often rely on money earned in prison to buy goods from the canteen or make phone calls, which means no job opportunities can trigger intense frustration. Sitting in cells for long periods with nothing to do also creates boredom, which may fuel violence and drug use. Of course, higher violence makes it more challenging to deliver purposeful activity, but this is unlikely to be the main driver. Nationally, the fall in purposeful activity preceded the sharp rise in violence, and prisoner surveys show they think they are more likely to reoffend if they spend less time they spend out of their cells and engaged in constructive activity.  ²² HM Inspectorate of Prisons, Purposeful prisons: time out of cell, September 2024, https://cloud-platform-e218f50a4812967ba1215eaecede923f.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/sites/19/2024/09/Purposeful-prisons-time-out-of-cell-web-2024.pdf

Driving up training and employment levels is the right move from the government – and could even save money long term

There are concrete steps the government could take to increase purposeful activity. Expanding training facilities as part of the prison expansion plan is crucial, but will only keep the prison system standing still. In our latest report, we recommend establishing a ‘minimum regime’ timetable of activity in a prison. This would set out a floor for both the proportion of prisoners participating in purposeful activity and the amount of activity delivered per prisoner. There would be different levels for each type of prison, with higher expectations for open and training prisons, which are specifically intended to equip prisoners with skills to succeed after release.

Such a regime would require political commitment, adequate funding, and for capacity pressures on prisons to remain below last year’s crisis levels. Specific funding for purposeful activity is needed, but we did not find a significant relationship between the proportion of prisoners engaging in purposeful activity and the average cost per prisoner. While this seems counterintuitive – getting ‘more for less’ – it likely comes back to the relationship between higher activity and lower violence. All other things being equal, more violent prisons have more staff. So if higher activity levels can reduce violence, they can reduce the number of staff needed as well.

There is also another way that increasing purposeful activity can cut costs. Education in prison  ²³ Collins J, Prison education: a review of the evidence, 2024, https://www.clinks.org/sites/default/files/2024-02/clinks_el_prison-education_V2.pdf  and employment on release  ²⁴ Ministry of Justice and Department for Work and Pensions, ‘Top bosses join forces to get thousands of offenders into work’, 10 January 2025, accessed 11 March 2025, https://www.gov.uk/government/news/top-bosses-join-forces-to-get-thousands-of-offenders-into-work  are two of the best means of reducing reoffending. This not only has public benefits from less crime and fewer victims. It also offers substantial potential savings for police forces and the Ministry of Justice. In an increasingly tight spending environment and departments facing serious cuts in the upcoming spending review, increasing education and employment in prisons will improve conditions, cut crime – and save money.