Prisons in England and Wales will be overcrowded to the point of reaching an “operational breaking point” come the second week of July, Tom Wheatley, president of the Prison Governors’ Association told the Financial Times.
Wheatley also said that the UK’s criminal justice system will likely “grind to a halt” if immediate changes are not implemented. UK prisons might be faced with being unable to take on new inmates, allowing police cells to fill up, and courts delaying sentencing.
According to Wheatley, the current Conservative government had ignored repeated warnings about overcrowding and said official data has shown jails will not be able to take in any more inmates within “a week or two” of the UK general election.
“The government has known about this for ages. There are things they could have done, and didn’t, right up until the election was called,” Wheatley said. “They made it inevitable that someone else would have to make very difficult decisions.”
The most recent statistics published by the Ministry of Justice on June 28 showed the prison population standing at 87,360, while the capacity (with assigning two prisoners to the same cell) is 88,818 in England and Wales.
Should the Labor Party win the July 4 general election, they could be faced with a logistical nightmare in repairing a broken prison system. It could also trigger “Operation Early Dawn” which is a “crisis measure that allows offenders to be housed in police cells when jails are full, while other measures can prompt magistrates courts to delay cases,” The Guardian reported in June.
While Operation Early Dawn has typically only been used for about a week at a time in the past, Wheatley told The Guardian that if the incoming government tries to force more offenders into UK prisons, they could be challenged in the courts.
“If a new government arrives and says: ‘We want more people in,’ it would be challenged in court by the PGA because ministers would be placing our members at risk,” he said.
Last October when the prisons were overflowing, the Ministry of Justice allowed the release of some inmates 70 days early. The Labour Party has reportedly mirrored the Conservatives’ pledge to build 20,000 new prison places but has not revealed a plan to address the current overcrowding, The Financial Times said.
“We are under no illusions — the situation we inherit will be dire. But we will take steps to address the crisis and fix the justice system for the long-term”, said Shabana Mahmood, the Shadow Lord Chancellor of the UK and a Labour Party politician, who said that the Tories had allowed UK prisons to “become a powder keg, waiting to explode”.