An inspection at HMP Altcourse last month has highlighted one of the biggest challenges facing Andy Burnham's government: under-pressure and under-resourced prisons are full. For decades, politicians from both benches have encouraged longer sentences but have not built the prisons to match.
The issue has come to the fore in recent years, with England and Wales' prison population almost reaching its capacity of around 89,000. The most recently published government statistics list the prison population at around 97% of that figure. If prisons get completely full, courts will not be able to sentence some of the most serious criminals, while people suspected of the worst crimes will remain in the community ahead of their trials instead of on remand.
Reception prison under pressure
Altcourse, privately operated by Sodexo, is part of the wider prison network. As a reception prison, it serves as the primary entry point for inmates who are newly sentenced or remanded. But with around 80,000 cases still pending in the crown courts, the demand for reception prison places has rapidly overtaken availability. The result is that Altcourse is now one of the busiest prisons in England and Wales and has a volatile population churn.
In his Altcourse report, published this week, chief inspector of prisons Charlie Taylor said: "The prison was managing significant population pressures. At the time of our visit, nearly a third of prisoners were on licence recall, one of the highest proportions currently in the reception estate.
"This population generated additional demand across several functions, including offender management, public protection and resettlement. National population pressures also meant that the prison regularly received prisoners who would ordinarily have been held elsewhere, adding to the complexity and turnover that leaders were required to manage."
High turnover and illicit activity
The report found that the prison's reception unit had 950 admissions in June this year. Although traditionally meant to only serve the courts of Cheshire, parts of Merseyside and Bolton, "national population pressures" have meant prisoners have been diverted from out of the area. Over 50% of the Fazakerley prison was made up of inmates from the Greater Manchester area, due to facilities there, including Salford's Forrest Bank, not having capacity.
Mark Fairhurst, national chairman of the Prison Officers' Association (POA) union, which does not represent staff at Altcourse because of its status as a privately operated facility, said the report "highlighted the additional pressures being placed on prison staff by overcrowding, population churn and prisoners being moved into establishments that would not ordinarily hold them". Mr Fairhurst, an industry expert who also serves as a prison officer at HMP Liverpool, said the extra strain was making staff's jobs significantly harder.
He told the ECHO: "Staff are being asked to manage increasingly complex and unpredictable populations while dealing with staffing pressures and disruption to services. This places significant additional demands on already stretched officers and makes it harder to provide the level of care, supervision and rehabilitation prisoners need.
"These pressures also have the potential to destabilise prisons. Where establishments are overcrowded and understaffed, the ability to maintain safe and orderly regimes is inevitably weakened, increasing the risk of violence, drugs, self-harm and other incidents."
The inspectors' report found category B facility Altcourse continued to be blighted by high rates of illicit activity, and self-harm rates remained among the highest in reception prisons.
Government response and early release
A spokesperson for Altcourse told the ECHO this week: "Whilst it was assessed that reasonable progress had been made in relation to both violence reduction and tackling illicit drugs, we share the chief inspector's push for even further improvements in these areas.
"Altcourse continues to operate amid significant population pressures with a complex, high-turnover prisoner population, but working alongside our partners we remain focused on building on the progress made and addressing all of the areas identified by the Inspectorate."
Part of the government's short-term plan to ease pressure on prisons like Altcourse comes in the highly controversial early release scheme. Under changes in the Sentencing Act, around 6,000 offenders will be freed in October after serving a third of their sentence – rather than half – as part of efforts to reduce overcrowding. Prisoners serving sentences of four years or more would be eligible for release at the halfway point of their term, rather than two-thirds.
Mr Burnham announced earlier this month that people jailed for rape, serious child sex offences and grooming would be excluded from the upcoming release scheme in October. He has also faced calls to extend that further after it was revealed the killers of police officer Andrew Harper would be eligible for release under the initiative. It currently stands that Mr Burnham has blocked their release.
Mr Burnham previously said he "wanted to go even further" on the scheme, but it was not possible without the prison system collapsing – putting the public "at much greater risk".
Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood told The Times last week: "If you run out of prison places entirely you will see the collapse of the criminal justice system, the police won't be able to make arrests and of course there won’t be a trial and that is not a thing that any government can allow to happen.
"I had to make choices that were about getting the system away from collapse and trying to get to a more sustainable position in the future."
However, Mr Fairhurst said: "Any measures that reduce the prison population can provide some immediate relief, but early release alone cannot resolve the underlying capacity, staffing and estate problems. The priority must be to reduce the pressure on prisons while ensuring there are sufficient staff, resources and suitable accommodation to safely manage those who remain in custody."
The ECHO approached GMB Union, which represents staff at Altcourse, for this story but did not receive a response.
