There is no short-term solution to prison overcrowding. We need more prisons
If a society is running out of room in its prisons, it has four basic options of what can be done about it. It can build more prisons, it can cram more people into its existing prisons, it can stop imprisoning people for certain offences, or it can reduce the sentences that prisoners serve. There are many ways to skin a cat, but all of the potential options involve some mixture of those four strategies.
In recent decades, Britain experimented with a mixture of the second and third of these options. The prison population has steadily ticked up toward 100 per cent of its intended capacity, and the threshold for custodial sentences has increased, with increasingly persistent recidivists being given community services or suspended sentences. Since 2024, we have been experimenting with the fourth option, when the incoming Labour government moved the automatic release point for eligible standard determinate sentences (SDS) from 50 per cent to 40 per cent of the sentence.