Our standard sentences are routinely substantially longer than elsewhere. The percentage of our population serving prison sentences is almost twice that in Germany, let alone Scandinavia, and very substantially higher than in most of the developed world. I need spend little time establishing that there are too many people in prison. Can anyone doubt that today our prisons truly are in crisis-seriously overcrowded, understaffed and volatile-and that the solution cannot be simply to build more, but lies rather in adopting fresh approaches to reducing their population and restoring what is now almost entirely lost: the real prospect of prison sentences actually being used to reform and rehabilitate inmates? Today, there are over 85,000 prisoners and, on present trends, this number is projected to rise in a very few years to over 90,000. My Lords, when opening the debate here on prison reform early last year, the noble Lord, Lord Fowler, now our esteemed Lord Speaker, recalled that when in the 1970s the prison population first exceeded 40,000, the Times published a series of articles under the heading “The Prisons Crisis”.
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