The prisons research team at ICPR has given evidence to an important review of sentencing policy in England and Wales.
The independent review offers a vital opportunity to depart from policies causing well-documented sentencing inflation, which have helped our prison population to double in three decades. Reform is needed urgently: the system is in crisis, the prison population is predicted to rise yet further in the years ahead, and the Government accepts it cannot build its way out of this mess.
Our response to the review draws on decades of World Prison Brief trend data, to show how England and Wales has become an outlier in Western Europe, imprisoning more than any other country in the region. We explain how countries like the Netherlands and Finland have also experienced unsustainable surges in their prison populations in recent history, but reversed them by adopting clear strategies and policies designed to prioritise resocialisation, not punishment, as the route to cutting reoffending rates.
The review’s Chair, former Lord Chancellor David Gauke, has expressed his wish to learn from the experience of other countries. This Government cannot afford not to learn lessons from America, South Africa and the many other countries where politically driven policies led to mass incarceration and all its social and economic harms.