Sentencing inflation

Why are there so many individuals in jail?

There have been two major causes of the regular rise in jail numbers that has taken place for the reason that Second World Warfare. The primary is a steady escalation within the size of sentences imposed for extra severe offences. The second is a insecurity within the efficacy of non-custodial sentences for much less severe offences. These components might need been offset if imprisonment had proved an event for efficient rehabilitation, however it has not. Different causes embody the rise within the requirement for a lot of prisoners to serve two thirds of the sentence earlier than launch, and that licence circumstances now apply for the whole thing of the sentence. The variety of prisoners recalled to jail throughout this era of supervision has soared.

The difficulty

Opposite to public notion, official knowledge present a long-term decline in frequent sorts of crime for the reason that Nineteen Nineties. The variety of police-recorded homicides has decreased for the reason that early 2000s and the amount of violent crime has declined considerably since a peak in 1995. This phenomenon is noticed throughout high-income international locations and researchers have explored potential causes, pointing to a variety of socio-economic and political components resembling improved safety and surveillance, financial progress, and an ageing inhabitants. There may be little proof that elevated use of longer jail sentences has contributed to falling crime charges. Certainly a 2014 Pew Basis examine discovered that almost all US states who’ve diminished the quantity they use incarceration over latest years (pushed in nice half by financial considerations) and have discovered that crime charges have gone down.

However regardless of these downward developments, each the variety of custodial sentences, and crucially their size, have elevated dramatically. The proportion of speedy custodial sentences handed down for indictable or triable-either-way offences between 2002 and 2022 elevated from 25% to 34%, while using different disposal varieties declined. 

Over the past 10 years, the common custodial sentence size for indictable offences elevated from 18 months in 2013 to nearly 23 months in 2024. The chart I’ve reproduced beneath comes from the newest (August 2024) MoJ felony justice statistics.Use of probably the most extreme sentences has additionally elevated. Nearly 11,000 persons are at the moment serving an indeterminate sentence, comprising 16% of the sentenced jail inhabitants and up from 9% in 1993. 

The variety of life sentence prisoners serving a minimal time period of over 20 years extra than doubled between 2013 and 2023. As of June 2024, there have been 67 individuals serving complete life orders (in comparison with 43 a decade earlier). This isn’t solely a latest pattern; the size of sentences has steadily elevated, and roughly doubled, during the last 50 years.