Inside England and Wales's prisons crisis: Performance Tracker Local

More work and education and increasing access to open prisons could turn around over a decade of strikingly poor prison performance in England and Wales.

This report, the first in a new IfG series – funded by the Nuffield Foundation – on public service performance at the local level, lays bare the shockingly high levels of violence, protests and self-harm and severely limited work and education opportunities for prisoners.  

It combines statistical analysis of published data, interviews with experts and two prison visits, argues that widespread systemic problems like overcrowding and a lack of purposeful activity for prisoners – more than widespread failures by individual prison governors or particularly challenging prisoner cohorts – are causing severe and sustained decline. The report also shows how open prisons consistently outperform other categories of prison on a range of measures. 

But with some prisons continuing to stand out as high performers, Keir Starmer’s government can learn from examples of successful prisons to deliver rapid improvements. The report sets out four key recommendations to achieve this aim.