Why are prisons overcrowded? Because no government will stand up to the tabloids | Zoe Williams

Prisons in England and Wales are full because sentences have increased, and everybody knows this. Lord chief justices know this – four of them said it outright in a report for the Howard League two years ago – ministers know it, and anyone who can count knows it. The prison population in England and Wales was 40,000 in 1991, 88,000 in 2024 and is estimated to hit 105,000 by 2028. Every government promises to increase capacity; no government this century has been able to do that fast enough to cope with the numbers.

One prisons inspector, lamenting conditions that were creating unacceptably high levels of violence, said: “The bath was in danger of overflowing, and they either had to turn the taps off or they had to let some water out.” But the taps have not been turned off, the bigger baths (new, often private jails) have been offset by existing baths (old Victorian prisons) disintegrating, and as soon as a government found the energy and maturity to let some water out – in the form of the early release scheme – it immediately hit the wall of tabloid outrage that created this problem in the first place.

The fact is that Andy Burnham can press ahead with the early release scheme; he can create problematic caveats; he can overturn indeterminate sentencing, the measure created in 2003 whereby prisoners could spend years over their tariff in prison because the onus was now on them to prove they weren’t dangerous (which is quite difficult to do from prison, and more difficult still from a failing one). Or he can not do any of these things. But he won’t get a grip on the problem until he allows the possibility that sentences are too high for stupid reasons. The act of murder hasn’t changed in 100 years (or 1,000). There is nothing to stop a prime minister bringing sentences back down to where they were in the 90s.

“Tough on crime” is a very easy win, politically speaking: it makes you sound like a firm leader, without having an impact on any ordinary person’s life, except in a good way, and you can modify to it to the right (by being tougher still on crime) and to the left (by also being tough on the causes of crime). This puts you at the mercy, however, of people for whom there is no tough enough. There will always be a murder so heinous that the maximum existing imprisonment doesn’t feel like enough; there will always be a comparison ready that if x violent act warranted four years behind bars, how can y merit only three and a half? There will always be people who blankly do not see the point of parole, believing it to be somehow an insult to the expectations of victims, because they have never engaged with its purpose. When you can’t decide when or what to eat and how often to shower, the principle that you will be released sooner if you cooperate is an important buffer between you and the abyss, without which prison populations are hard to manage. You really have to be yelling “Life should mean life” at the top of your voice not to understand this but, regrettably, some people always will be.

The purpose of prison itself has always been threefold – punishment, public protection and rehabilitation – which is completely understood except by those who choose not to understand it. Those aims can all be met only if they are complementary. If prisons can’t rehabilitate because they are overcrowded and violent, the public will not be protected when prisoners are released. If the deprivation of freedom is not seen as punishment enough, if only cruel conditions count, then the chances of returning prisoners to society as better-adjusted, more stable people are reduced to nil. Those who argue for a more humane approach in prisons are always painted as living in a fantasy land, while the direct opposite is the case: people who want ever-lengthening sentences in the harshest possible conditions are the fantasists, since they leave us all with only two options, both of them absurd – return prisoners to society as dangerous as before, or keep them inside for ever.

Burnham knows all this; Keir Starmer knew it; even Liz Truss, as justice minister in 2017, sabre-rattling that early release wasn’t the answer, knew it. Tony Blair and David Blunkett knew it in 2003, when they introduced statutory starting points for murder – never again would a lenient judge give them a comms headache on a slow news day. Successive governments have tried to make law to satisfy the tabloids, but they are never satiated, only emboldened.

Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist