Lord Woolf, former Chief Justice of England and Wales, has likened overcrowding to “a cancer eating at the ability of the prison service” to prepare incarcerated individuals for reintroduction into society through education and rehabilitation. Several prisoners are often held in cells meant for single occupancy, and prisons have breached maximum capacity to the extent that holding cells in police stations and courthouses are eventually used for incarceration. Ian Dunt of Politics.co.uk notes, “You were more likely to die in prison than five years ago…more prisoners were murdered, killed themselves, self-harmed and were victims of assaults than five years ago."

 

Compare the numbers, and it’s easy to see that the rise in violence is a proven correlation of the growth in prison population without expanding facilities. The number of people held behind bars has almost doubled in the last twenty years, from 45,000 in 1993 to 86,000 today. Prison staff has diminished by about a third with 25,000 in the force in 2010 compared to 18,000 in 2015. Naturally an increase in violence follows. Prisons experienced 15,000 incidents in 2007 while in 2016 the number reached almost 24,000.

 

Much of this can be seen as a direct result of the cost-cutting initiatives from the early days of the Coalition government. In 2012 Chris Grayling was appointed Secretary of State for Justice, at which point he implemented several controversial reforms. In addition to a ban on all parcels, including those containing books or clothing, Grayling also introduced a “benchmarking” program. This required prisons to reduce their operating costs to the same rates as the most efficiently run prisons, even those among the private sector. The Ministry of Justice estimates that annual prison costs dropped 20% between 2010 and 2016. Budget cuts manifested in the closure of 18 prisons and prison wings as well as the downsizing of staff. Experienced officers were forced into early retirement while high stress and low salaries warded off new recruits. Due to staff shortages, many activities in the daily routine were canceled including activities imperative to rehabilitation such as educational classes or library visits. Paired with a sentencing race among governments to prove that politicians were “tough on crime,” the result is the most inundated and arguably most ineffective prison system in all of Western Europe. England and Wales would do well to model themselves after their neighbor nations in the UK who run their own prison service: only 7,200 individuals are incarcerated in Scotland, the lowest in a decade, and Northern Ireland has a mere 1,500 people behind bars, fewer than in the mid 90s.

 

Discord, however, is nothing new to the UK prison estate. The biggest disturbance in history was the 1990 Strangeways Prison riot in Manchester. The 25-day upheaval protesting deplorable living conditions provoked demonstrations in solidarity at eight other prisons. Strangeways became the catalyst that brought about the abolition of “slopping out,” a practice that required prisoners to manually empty their human waste every morning due to the lack of toilets in cells, a result of prison facilities dating back to the Victorian era. In the aftermath of the riot, advocates pushed reforms that sought to address the overcrowding, cruel use of solitary confinement, and general mismanagement that was common practice in the prison system of the 70s and 80s. Despite some gains, however, overcrowding persists nearly 30 years later.

 

After years of both reform and regression, inmates are now subject to solitary confinement typically on a case-by-case basis, and the practice is meant to be non-punitive. However, concerns have been raised that solitary confinement is stilled used as punishment and applied arbitrarily. Prisoners who are suspected of drug possession or involved in assaults on guards and other prisoners are usually singled out for segregation. While people may be held in solitary for up to 21 days at a time, a few hours of confinement is more common. Roughly a dozen or so cells make up the segregation wing of most prisons, but only a handful are ever occupied at any one time. Estimates of the number of incarcerated individuals in isolation in the UK hover around 500, compared to at least 80,000 in the US according to a 2012 poll. Disruptive prisoners are separated from mainstream prisons in Close Supervision Centers in conditions somewhat resembling isolation. These prisoners are still visited daily by a staff member, nurse and chaplain, and they are also allowed unlimited outside visits and TVs in their cells.

 

Even before the strike, newly instated Justice Secretary Liz Truss had vowed to increase funding and add 2,500 new staff members, hoping to expand prisons’ autonomy in operations and maintaining closer monitoring. Her main focus is reduction in reoffending. Critics contend that these moves are too little too late, pointing to the detrimental effects of cost-cutting measures. “It’s not good enough for the Coalition to sack 7,000 experienced officers and then announce the recruitment of 2,500 between now and 2020,” states MP Karl Turner, citing the replacement of veteran officers with inexperienced ones to save money. Others call for more radical measures such as sentence changing or early release schemes. Whatever the means, British politicians have unanimously recognized the dire need to improve the prison system before it gets “as bad as America’s.”