Crime has fallen, yet here we are again, facing a prisons crisis

The most recent figures suggest that crime has fallen to the lowest level since the beginning of reliable survey data 41 years ago. Admittedly, the figures are hard to compare, because crimes of fraud and computer misuse have been recorded only for the past six years – and internet scams did not exist in 1982.

But taking into account the change in the types of crime covered by the Crime Survey for England and Wales, the latest figures, for the calendar year 2022, strongly suggest a good-news story that is rarely reported. The Crime Survey is a good measure of the prevalence of crime, because it is based on what a random sample of people report has happened to them, rather than relying on the police to record crimes.

The Independent argues that, since crime has fallen, we should need to put fewer people in prison. There are those who would argue the opposite – namely that it is only because the prison population has risen, which it started to do, sharply, in the mid-1990s, that crime has fallen.

Our view is that, although jailing prolific offenders by definition prevents them from contributing to the statistics, most of the fall in crime is probably caused by social changes: young men playing computer games rather than fighting, for example.

Whatever one thinks of these long-term trends, however, there has been a short-term change that could have allowed a breathing space, and a chance to move the prison estate beyond its state of semi-permanent stress. The coronavirus caused the first significant fall in the prison population since the beginning of the First World War, going down from 84,000 in England and Wales to 78,000.

Unfortunately, that respite was not used to reset prison policy. We would have liked to see it used to prepare for a permanently lower prison population, with permanently better provision for rehabilitation. But even if the government’s aim – as its rhetoric suggested – was to increase prison capacity while paying lip service to rehabilitation, the breathing space was wasted.

The capacity of the prison system has not increased, while the population has gone back up to 85,000 and is fast approaching the previous peak of 87,000 recorded in 2012. We make no apology for putting this bad-news story that is rarely reported on our digital front page.

Just because we have been here before does not make our prison system any less shaming. There have been forecasts before of a prison population far exceeding capacity. There have been warnings before of the danger of disorder if prisoners are kept in cells for 23 hours a day. There have been short-term use of portacabins and police cells deployed as overflows. Ministers have pleaded with judges before to go easy on sentences for the sorts of crimes that the punitive press will not make a fuss about.

We missed our chance during the pandemic to move towards a more humane policy, and instead made the problem worse by allowing backlogs to build up in the courts, so that space has to be found for more prisoners on remand – many of whom will eventually be acquitted.

Those backlogs need to be cleared as an urgent priority. This is a test for Alex Chalk, the new justice secretary. Will he succeed in persuading the Treasury that more needs to be spent on extra capacity, and on rehabilitation, subject to the strict test of what works in reducing reoffending? Will he be brave enough to say that there are too many non-violent offenders in prison? Or will he simply allow the same old problems to fester until there is a crisis of disorder?