The prison population

The number of prisoners in England and Wales has increased by over 25,000 in recent years.

In 1993, the average prison population was 44,566
In May 1997 it was 60,131
In June 2001 it stood at 66,105

The number of women in prison has increased particularly dramatically.

In 1993 the average female prison population was 1,560
In 1998 it stood at 3,105
In May 2003 it had risen to 4,437

The Prison Service publishes weekly updates of the current prison population through its “Prison Population & Accommodation Briefings” on its web-site at. The prison size and gender balance of population on 25 January 2008 is set out below:

Male
 76311
Female
 4402
No. of prisoners held in police cells under Operation Safeguard*
 65
TOTAL
 80778


Useable Operational Capacity
 81686
Spaces available under Operation Safeguard*
 400
TOTAL
 82086


Number under Home Detention Curfew supervision 2348

* These vary from night to night and up to a 400 place ceiling.

The figures for the corresponding population twelve months previously are shown below for the purpose of comparison:

Male
 75317
Female
 4414
No. of prisoners held in police cells under Operation Safeguard*
 271
TOTAL
 80002


Useable Operational Capacity
 80375
Spaces available under 'Operation Safeguard'
 341
TOTAL
 80716


Number under Home Detention Curfew supervision 2353

Useable Operational Capacity of the estate is the sum of all establishments’ operational capacity less 2,000 places. This is known as the operating margin and reflects the constraints imposed by the need to provide separate accommodation for different classes of prisoner i.e. by sex, age, security category, conviction status, single cell risk assessment and also due to geographical distribution.

Of all those people sentenced to custody in the second quarter of 2005, one in five was from a minority ethnic group and 35% of minority ethnic prisoners were foreign nationals. At 58 per cent, black prisoners account for the largest number of minority ethnic prisoners and their numbers are rising - whereas the prison population grew by just over 12 per cent between 1999 and 2002, the number of black prisoners increased by 51 per cent.

The number of life sentence prisoners has increased considerably in recent years, rising from 3,000 in 1992 to 5,352 in February 2003. The number of adult prisoners serving short sentences has also increased since 1991, when the number of adult prisoners sentenced to 12 months was just over 22,000, to 2001, when it was more than 49,000.

Currently, about 70 per cent of adult offenders were on drugs before entering prison, a third did not have settled accommodation prior to custody, with one in five claiming to have been sleeping rough. Two thirds have no job and over a half have no qualifications, with about 37 per cent of offenders leaving prison with a reading ability at or below Level 1 according to the Offender Learning Green Paper published in December 2005.

Clearly, the scale and complexity of the task facing the prison service has increased over the years as the prison population has risen.