The length of time prisoners spend on remand should be intolerable in a civilised society

It is hard to believe that more than 4,000 people who must be presumed innocent, because they have not yet been proven guilty, have been imprisoned in this country for longer than six months.

At the six-month point, the law requires a judge to approve the prisoner’s continued detention. This is virtually automatic, and it means that there are now 2,000 prisoners on remand, awaiting trial, who have been detained for more than a year.

Hardest of all to believe is that there are 150 prisoners who have waited more than five years for their day in court. All of them are male, and one-third of them are non-white.

This ought to be intolerable in a civilised society, and yet it is another example of how our backlogged public services have deteriorated, and how they have failed to bounce back following the pandemic. The criminal justice system, like so much of the public sector, was fragile before the lockdowns, and it seems it is simply unable to recover from the shock.

More than a year after the last coronavirus restrictions were lifted, we find that the number of prisoners on remand rose 16 per cent in the year to 30 June, reaching a 50-year high, according to Ministry of Justice figures obtained by The Independent.

This has serious consequences. Not just that many people who will be found by the courts to have committed no crime have been deprived of their liberty for much longer than necessary. But that remand prisoners who are innocent are increasingly pleading guilty, against the advice of their lawyers, because they know they will get out of jail sooner than if they wait for a trial.

It is a paradox that Daniel Khalife’s alleged escape from prison has prompted more discussion about the crisis in our prisons than any of the routine problems endured by the inmates, convicted or awaiting trial, over decades. Overcrowding; the lack of effective rehabilitation; the high rate of recidivism: none of these generate much media coverage. But a prison escape drama with a plot resembling that of Paddington 2 suddenly focused attention on the state of our jails.

The Independent has tried to seize the moment, drawing attention in recent days to the dangers of high staff turnover in prisons and to the shocking rate of staff absence in Wandsworth on the day of Khalife’s alleged escape – there may not have been any direct cause and effect, but the story has illuminated the wider problem of poor staff morale and administrative inefficiency.

Thanks to last week’s drama, more people are aware that the prison system serves society badly. We believe that with bold leadership, public opinion can be persuaded that non-custodial sentences and high-quality rehabilitation are in everyone’s interest, and are not “soft” options.

Michael Gove briefly started the process of reform when he was justice secretary for little more than a year at the end of David Cameron’s ministry. He succeeded in reversing some of his predecessor Chris Grayling’s counterproductive policies, such as denying prisoners easy access to books. But he never really got started on a more thoroughgoing programme of prison reform. In the seven years since he moved on, there have been seven justice secretaries, none lasting as long as two years: Liz Truss, David Lidington, David Gauke, Robert Buckland, Dominic Raab, Brandon Lewis, Dominic Raab again, and Alex Chalk.

Mr Chalk now has a chance to restore some stability. He needs to get a grip, urgently, on the courts backlog that condemns so many to long waits on remand. Speeding up the courts may, of course, increase the number of people sent into the main prison estate, which is already dangerously overcrowded. Which is why the justice secretary needs at the same time to make the case for shorter sentences, more productive forms of community service, and more effective ways of keeping people out of trouble with the law.