Prisons are full to bursting – and the UK riots have thrown their usefulness back in the spotlight

The spasm of violent disorder that has gripped England and Northern Ireland over the last week has thrown the issue of prison capability back into the spotlight. Before the brutal murders of three children in Southport, it looked just about possible for our national jail service, running at 99% capacity, to stagger over the line in September when the reduction in time served by the incoming government from 50% to 40% took hold and gave some respite. 

Now after days of violent disorder from Plymouth to Sunderland, egged on by social media misinformation, hundreds of people are being pushed through the criminal justice system by a government determined to make an example of them. That example will include jail time, sometimes years of it, for the orgy of criminality that has hijacked the grief of families devastated by loss and grief. 

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The state must reassert control over such behaviour. It’s primary task is to maintain order and safety. Unfortunately this mission has been hampered by a criminal justice in pieces after years or neglect and ideological vandalism. It has also been bedevilled by allegations of poor crisis communication and the behaviour and tactics of the policing response. In particular the charge of differential policing, where the response to disorder by white protestors is perceived as much harsher than other minorities, has been allowed to fester. The prime minister, Sir Keir Starmer may see this as a ‘non issue’ but that is not the feeling on the ground where it is hard to reconcile the video of police response with assurances that policing of all protests is carried out without fear or favour. 

Starmer is facing his first big crisis in government after a fortuitous if short three-week honeymoon since his landslide victory on 4 July. We are told that his chief of staff, Sue Gray, had prisons at the top of her list of critical threats for the incoming administration. Starmer cannot be blamed for 14 years of mismanagement of prisons resulting in conditions so bad that other European countries refused to extradite their nationals to. But this is now a detail lost on citizens who demand that the culture of criminal immunity that has disfigured our country is dealt with immediately and severely. He must resist those who are calling the acts of wanton destruction ‘terrorism’. There is no coherent ideology behind looting vape shops, burning libraries or destroying a Citizen’s Advice office. To reward this nihilistic behaviour with such a label is wrong. We have more than enough criminal law to deal with these offenders.

It is arguable that those who tried to set fire to a migrant hotel were committing acts of terrorism. Certainly, the occupants and staff were terrorised. But even if not, it will be of little comfort to the perpetrators when found. And found they will be. Arson with intent to endanger life ranges from eight years in custody to life imprisonment. 

Starmer the prime minister is in a very different position than Starmer the chief prosecutor who co-ordinated the response to the 2011 riots following the fatal police shooting of Mark Duggan. Then, serious violence flared across 66 towns and cities in England with more than 5,000 disorder offences detected and around 4,000 arrests. This translated into 331 of the 550 convictions resulting in immediate custody for an average of 17 months. Back then, the criminal stupidity of the austerity cuts to the criminal justice system has not bitten. There was more headroom within the prison system to accommodate these offenders and crucially the years of frontline experience had not yet been driven out by redundancy. So there was the capacity and capability to manage angry offenders, many of whom sentenced for the first time in places very far away from home. 

By contrast, the 2024 riots have occurred in fewer places and the current arrests stand at 10% of that in the previous social unrest. This is helpful, if it stays that way, because in all other respects the prison service is completely incapable of managing a surge in population at the same time as waiting for overcrowding relief measures to kick in. Prisons are full to bursting, many more of them are in special measures or bucking because of rampant violence, squalor, distress and record rates of assault. The service has been battered by high profile security scandals. It is being forced to reopen a child prison HMP Cookham Wood to create some space for riot convicts.

This prison has only recently been closed down following a devastating inspection that revealed complete anarchy behind the razor wire with young people in fear of their lives carrying weapons and staff overwhelmed by violence. One imagines the same battered and traumatised staff will now have their work cut out for them managing adults who believe they are ideologically motivated and untouchable by authority imprisoned perhaps hundreds of miles away from their families. We can only wish them and their colleagues at the other prison that is earmarked for disorder overspill the best of luck. But there is a real possibility that the risk these offenders pose is transferred from the street corner to prison landings where the capability to contain them, let alone rehabilitate, simply doesn’t exist.

There is a certain irony in politicians piously calling for less custody for offenders now baying for exemplary sentences for ‘extreme right-wing thuggery’, as the prime minister puts it. It certainly makes the work of the new prisons minister James Timpson harder to achieve. Timpson was a surprise and clever move by the new Labour administration. Appointing a prisons minister who didn’t simply have to do the job as a penance before better ministerial picking was a good move. Timpson’s direct involvement in offender rehabilitation has means prison leavers thriving in his ubiquitous watch repair retail outlets. The planned emergency sentence reduction would otherwise have meant that from September on the prison service had some headroom to try to sort out all the many other organisation and cultural problems it has. The riots have driven a coach and horses through that because of the likely numbers destined for jails, now sitting in police custody in places already double booked to crisis manage prison overspill. Try to get your head around that one. The work of working out what prisons are for and how to make them if not good at, least not active accelerants of future offending, is delayed again. 

We cannot know at the time of writing how bad the civil unrest will become. While it shows signs of fizzling out the situation in the country with extremism from all parts of the ideological spectrum is febrile and could flare back into insurrection very quickly. Whether or not we have prison space to deal with these offenders is crucial. But beyond that, we cannot avoid a date with an honest and therefore very uncomfortable national conversation about how we got here and how we can learn to live better together. Time will tell.

Professor Ian Acheson is a former prison governor and senior advisor at the Counter Extremism Project.

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