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Government must cancel unnecessary prison building (10 August 2010)

Commenting on the latest prison population projections, published today by the Ministry of Justice, Jon Collins, Campaign Director for the Criminal Justice Alliance, said:

'A prison-building programme is currently in place to increase prison capacity to 96,000 by 2014, a ruinously expensive project that has not yet been cancelled by the new Government. However, the figures released today show that even before the new Government's proposed reforms are taken into account, which should further reduce the need for prison places, no more that 92,000 places will be needed by 2014, and it could be as few as 85,200.

'While the new Government has made a promising start on criminal justice policy, contracts for new prisons continue to be signed and no decision has yet been taken to put on hold or scale back the prison-building programme. There is now no excuse to waste more public money on building all 96,000 prison places, when the Government's own research shows that they will not be needed.

'Instead of wasting billions of pounds on building an excessive number of new prison places, the Government needs to seize the opportunity presented by these projections to cancel unnecessary prison building projects and instead focus on reducing the use of prison.'