What is prison overcrowding?
The British prison population has been increasing rapidly in recent years, and the prison estate has struggled to keep up with the rising demand. As prisons are expensive and take a long time to build, the result of a lack of capacity has been overcrowding, which is when prisons have to house more inmates than they are designed for. Overcrowding may be attributed to a number of factors, including failure to find and use effective alternatives to prison, under-funding of prison building programmes, bureaucratic inefficiencies in moving prisoners between facilities, and loss of existing capacity due to age and deterioration. Background The overall trend in the rate of imprisonment has been fairly consistent over the last fifty years. Between 1951 and 1981, judges were sending more and more people to prison, culminating in major overcrowding problems in the late 1970s. There was a short period of declining prison populations from 1981, when fines, community sentences and cautions were inc
