Labour’s solution, as ever, is managerial. Their plan, set out on the party’s website, promises the largest prison expansion programme in modern history — 20,000 new places, with prisons fast-tracked through the planning system by being designated as infrastructure of “national importance” They talk about reducing reoffending by offering jobs and training, but the overall frame is clear: more bricks, more bars, more bodies locked away. And all in the name of “public safety.”
“Every new prison is an admission of policy failure — a monument to a society that can’t imagine justice without punishment.”
This is not justice. It is warehousing. The justice secretary’s plan to scrap short sentences and expand community supervision makes a kind of sense, but only when seen as a technical fix to the overcrowding crisis. Not as a coherent philosophy of justice. Meanwhile, Labour’s commitment to build new prisons tells you everything about their priorities. This is not about safety. It’s about optics. It’s about showing they’re tough enough, serious enough, not Corbyn.
As the House of Lords Library summarises, the government plans to reduce pressure by releasing some prisoners after serving just 40% of their sentence, while simultaneously building these new prisons and reforming planning laws to speed up construction. A two-track approach: a short-term concession to crisis, a long-term doubling-down on incarceration.
But if prisons are full, it’s not because we’ve run out of space. It’s because we’ve criminalised poverty, mental illness, addiction, and survival.
Sir Mark Rowley says releasing prisoners early without proper support will increase crime and overburden the police. He’s not wrong. But his solution is more resources for policing, not fewer prisoners. What neither the police nor the government will admit is that the criminal justice system has become a substitute for social care. We lock people up not because we’re afraid of them, but because we’ve defunded every alternative.
We do not need more prisons. We need fewer prisoners.
“You don’t solve overcrowding by adding more cages. You solve it by asking why so many people are locked up to begin with.”
Writing in the New Statesman, George Eaton highlights the contradictions in Labour’s pitch. The party is making the politically savvy move of outflanking the Tories and Reform UK on crime, but that risks cementing carceral logic. Without investing in mental health care, drug treatment, social housing and poverty relief, new prisons become a pressure valve, not a solution.
A significant proportion of individuals, particularly women, are incarcerated for short periods due to non-violent offences like theft and breaches of community orders. Many are poor. Many are addicted. Many are mentally unwell. Prisons have become the default response to social collapse.
It’s no coincidence that the prison population exploded after Thatcher, after Blair, after Cameron, after austerity. When you cut mental health services, benefits, housing, support for women fleeing abuse, and youth centres, you create the conditions for imprisonment. The state retreats with one hand and reappears in uniform with the other.
The answer isn’t just to release people early. Though that would be a start. The answer is to decriminalise poverty. Stop jailing people for begging or loitering, for being addicted to drugs, for shoplifting, for being failed by the welfare state. Expand youth programmes, fund restorative justice, treat drug use as a public health issue. Shut down the courts for minor offences. Let people rebuild their lives.
“Austerity filled our prisons. Build homes, not cells.”
We need to reduce the prison population by half over the next decade. Shut down the most violent institutions. Put the money into social housing, jobs, and mental health services. Not more surveillance. Not more probation conditions so strict they’re just prison by another name.
Labour talks about building trust. About safe streets. But you don’t build safety through punishment. You build it through solidarity. Through care. Through collective investment in the conditions that make safer communities possible.
You can’t cage your way out of a social crisis.
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