Building prisons is not the answer

This government has built an additional 21,000 prison places since 1997 (see Parliamentary question 1 June by Dr Rudi Vis MP). It just goes to show that you cannot build your way out of a prison overcrowding crisis. The figures are daunting. This total of 21,000 extra prison places includes new prisons (run by the private sector for profit and locked into long contracts) and extra blocks dumped inside perimeter walls, often on the exercise yard. But the number of people crammed into the system has increased just as fast as the new cells. Ten years ago there were 60,000 people in prison and now there are 83,000. So we are still short of a couple of thousand cells which have had to be found by forcing even more people to share a cell designed for one.

Prisons are like motorways. They fill up. Before you have even built them.

Both Conservatives and Labour are promising more of the same. The Conservatives think that by building more prisons they can somehow magically end overcrowding. Labour is not so optimistic, they are just talking about building more prisons and locking up more people and dont seem to care about cramming people into unsanitary and idle institutions.

There is crazy. We just have to control the numbers going into prison in the first place.