More people are being sent to prison in England and Wales every year than anywhere else in western Europe, figures described as “shameful” suggest.
The rate is about twice as high as Germany and roughly three times that of Italy and Spain, the Prison Reform Trust found. This amounted to more than 140,000 admissions to prison in England and Wales in 2017, the most recent year for which data is available.
The trust’s analysis suggests there are nearly 240 prison admissions for every 100,000 people in the England and Wales each year. It describes an “addiction to imprisonment” marked by the overuse of short sentences, the growing use of long terms and botched probation reforms.
The trust’s analysis, which used the latest available Council of Europe annual penal statistics, also showed:
The prison population in England and Wales is nearly 70% higher than three decades ago, at more than at 82,400.
England and Wales admitted 40,000 more people to prison than Germany each year, despite the latter’s larger population.
Scotland had the highest prison population rate per head, with 150 people held in prison for every 100,000. England and Wales have 139 and Northern Ireland 76.
Eighty-one of 120 of prisons in England and Wales were overcrowded.
The trust’s director, Peter Dawson, said: “These figures show the scale of the challenge that we face in breaking our addiction to imprisonment. Planned measures to limit the use of short sentences and correcting failed reforms to probation are both steps in the right direction.
“But our shamefully high prison population rates won’t be solved by these alone – a public debate about how we punish the most serious crime is overdue.”
The trust’s report says 46% of people imprisoned in England and Wales in 2018 were sentenced to six months or less.
More than two-and-a-half times as many people were sentenced to 10 years or more in 2018 than in 2006, despite levels of serious crime being “substantially” lower.
At 9,441, England and Wales also have the highest number of prisoners sentenced to indeterminate prison terms in western Europe, the report says. The figure is said to be more than Germany, Russia, Italy, Poland, Netherlands and Scandinavia combined.
The report also found that more than 7,000 people were in prison as a result of being recalled from licence, compared with about 150 in 1995.
David Gauke, the justice secretary, is considering whether to follow Scotland’s lead in adopting a presumption against short sentences in England and Wales.
He told the Commons earlier this month it was already the case that custodial measures were something “that should only be pursued as a last resort”, but said his department was “seeing if we can go further than that”.
He added that he hoped to expand on his proposals “in the very near future”.
The government announced earlier this year that supervision of all offenders in England and Wales was being brought back in-house after a failed attempt to part-privatise probation services.
The overhaul, introduced in 2014 under the then justice secretary, Chris Grayling, was designed to reduce reoffending, but was heavily criticised by MPs and regulators.