Inside England and Wales’s prisons crisis: Summary

The prison system in England and Wales is in an extremely poor state. Levels of violence, self-harm and drug use are shockingly high, prisoners’ work and education opportunities severely limited. Buildings are crumbling or in severe disrepair, many dangerously so, and physical conditions often unsanitary. ³⁴ Richards G and Davies N, ‘Performance Tracker 2023: Prisons’, Performance Tracker 2023, Institute for Government, 2023, www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/publication/performance-tracker-2023 ³⁵ Pope T, Tetlow G and Pattison J, Capital spending in public services: Fixing how the government invests in the NHS, schools and prisons, Institute for Government, 2024, www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/publication/capital-spending- public-services Inexperienced staff are struggling to cope with these increasingly fraught circumstances. 

The failure of successive governments since at least the early 2000s to expand the number of places to meet the growing number of prisoners has put severe pressure on capacity and exacerbated this decline. ³⁶ Rowland C, The crisis in prisons, Institute for Government, 2024, www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/publication/crisis-prisons Deep funding cuts implemented in the early 2010s have still not been fully reversed, even as the prison population has hit new highs. ³⁷ Richards G and Davies N, ‘Performance Tracker 2023: Prisons’, Performance Tracker 2023, Institute for Government, 2023, www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/publication/performance-tracker-2023 And while capital investment has risen sharply in recent years, this is focused on building new prisons and is insufficient to address the growing maintenance backlog. ³⁸ Pope T, Tetlow G and Pattison J, Capital spending in public services: Fixing how the government invests in the NHS, schools and prisons, Institute for Government, 2024, www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/publication/capital-spending- public-services In just the last two years, eight prisons have been issued with ‘urgent notifications’ by the prisons inspectorate, escalating serious concerns directly to the secretary of state. ³⁹ HM Inspectorate of Prisons, ‘Our reports’, urgent notifications, retrieved 23 December 2024, https://hmiprisons.justiceinspectorates.gov.uk/our-reports/?listing_search=&publication_typeyear=30&detention_type=0&themes=0  

Cuts to prison officer numbers as part of the coalition government’s austerity programme began to bite from 2012/13, with officer numbers in 2013/14 down 26% from 2009/10 and then staying flat until 2016/17, even as the prison population rose. ⁴⁰ Ministry of Justice and HM Prison and Probation Service, ‘HM Prison and Probation Service workforce quarterly: March 2024’, 2024, www.gov.uk/government/collections/national-offender-management-service-workforce-statistics  Recruitment since 2017/18 has partially reversed this, but many of these new officers have been to staff new prisons, leaving the number of prison officers per 1,000 prisoners in March 2024 still 8% below 2009/10 levels. Crucially, even as workforce numbers have recovered, the average officer is now much less experienced than before staff cuts. This combination of reduced staff numbers and experience is likely to have contributed substantially to prisons’ overall declining performance. 

That is the national picture. But what is the situation within individual prisons? Which are doing better or worse, and what might be driving that? This report – the first in a new series of analyses of public services at the local level across England and Wales from the Institute for Government and funded by the Nuffield Foundation – digs into the detail of prison performance to answer some of these questions. We find widespread decline across most prisons on a range of measures. Violence, self-harm and ‘protesting behaviours’ have risen sharply across almost all prisons. However, some buck the trend – particularly open prisons (category D sites). Clearly this is at least in part to do with the types of prisoner these prisons hold. But that is not the whole story, with open prisons continuing to outperform other categories even as the prisoner mix has changed in the last year. 

What is clear is that overcrowding and a lack of purposeful activity for prisoners are significantly associated with poor performance, especially violence. Reception prisons, with the highest levels of overcrowding and lowest purposeful activity, are overrepresented among the worst performers.

What does a good prison look like? 

Fairly judging how a prison is performing requires an understanding of what prisons should do – what outcomes they aim to produce, for whom, and at what cost. This will vary between types of prison. 

We look at a range of indicators to understand how prisons are performing. Violence is a key one: prisoner-on-prisoner and staff assault rates are a useful all-round performance indicator that tend to capture multiple factors that are hard to see otherwise in the data. ⁴⁷ Institute for Government interviews, 2024. Violence often reflects prisoner frustration that might stem from any or all of limited access to work, visits and health care; ⁴⁸ Institute for Government interviews, 2024.  poor relationships with prison officers; prison processes being seen as unfair and illegitimate; and declining physical conditions in prison. ⁴⁹ McGuire J, Understanding prison violence: a rapid evidence assessment, HM Prison and Probation Service, 2018, https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5b8e434540f0b67d970b92d5/understanding-prison-violence.pdf ⁵⁰ Institute for Government interviews, 2024. The drug trade within prisons is also a potential driver of violence, related to enforcing debts or controlling the market. ⁵¹ Institute for Government interviews, 2025. Protesting behaviours, such as ‘incidents at height’ (climbing on netting and roofs) and barricades (physically obstructing staff access to parts of the prison) also reflect these harder-to-see factors. 

We also consider pressure on prison capacity via overcrowding, the prison ‘regime’ (the routine that sets when prisoners are allowed out of their cells for meals, work, education and so on) and workforce metrics such as staff sickness and resignation rates. We do not look at rates of prisoner escapes, as these are low enough to make it hard to interpret variation across prisons or over time. 

While all prisons aim to achieve public protection, punishment and rehabilitation of offenders, different prisons have different roles and different categories of prison perform different roles. High-security (category A) prisons hold prisoners who pose the most threat to the public or national security. Category B prisons are long-term prisons for serious offenders serving longer sentences, or who are fairly high-risk but do not need to be in a high-security facility. As ‘training’ prisons, they focus on long-term training, education and rehabilitation for prisoners. Reception, or ‘local’, prisons are also category B, but hold remand prisoners (those waiting for their trial or sentencing) and short-term prisoners, who do not have time to progress through the prison system (for example, if their sentence is too short to go through the process for being recategorised). Some prisons hold a mix of remand and other category B prisoners. 

About two fifths of prisons are category C prisons, which hold almost half of all prisoners. They are divided into three categories: training, resettlement (intended to prepare prisoners for release) and both training and resettlement. Open prisons are category D and have minimal security: prisoners have more freedom to move around the prison and can apply for day release for work or education, or to spend time with family. There are 12 women’s prisons, of which two are open and 10 closed (non-open, higher security sites).

Key recommendations 

• Establish a ‘minimum regime’ across prisons – adequately funded and with targets on purposeful activity. Levels of purposeful activity are currently very low, which limits rehabilitation and may be contributing to violence and drug use. Establishing a minimum regime for each prison category would increase the focus on purposeful activity and hopefully improve conditions. This should be accompanied by the funding realistically needed to allow prisons to deliver this activity.
• Explore options for expanding access to open prisons. Open prisons have much better conditions and outcomes than other prison types, in addition to being cheaper to run. ⁵² Ministry of Justice, ‘Costs per place and costs per prisoner by individual prison’, HM Prison & Probation Service Annual Report and Accounts 2022-23, 2024. While this is clearly partly due to the prisoners they hold, it may be possible to expand access to open prisons safely. The government should conduct a thorough evaluation of the temporary presumptive recategorisation scheme, introduced in 2023 to move more prisoners into open conditions earlier in their sentence. This could lower overall violence, save money and improve outcomes.
• Identify elements of the open prison model that could be applied to other prisons. Naturally, not all prisoners will be suitable for open conditions, but there may be aspects of the regime in those prisons – such as more purposeful activity and greater responsibility around the site – that could be beneficially applied to closed prisons as well.
• Build on recent successes targeting employment after release. There have been real successes in recent years in improving prison outcomes, especially around employment. This has the potential to help reduce reoffending rates and facilitate productive rehabilitation, and should continue to be a focus in future.

Most of the findings in this paper are based on statistical analysis of published data, but we also carried out several interviews with experts and two prison visits. See the Methodology section in the Annex for more details.