ICPR's World Prison Brief data cited by leading news outlets

Journalists here and abroad have been using our prison populations data to make sense of the current crisis facing UK prisons. 

Last month, Bloomberg News published a report, 'Overcrowded Prisons Force Starmer to Take Biggest Gamble Yet'. The piece carried World Prison Brief data to show what an outlier the UK has become, locking up more of its population than any other country in Western Europe, as well as quotes from Catherine Heard, Director of ICPR's World Prison Research Programme, setting out some of the reasons for the current crisis.  

This week, in 'Britain’s prison service is caught in a doom loop' the Economist also covers the crisis and how we got here, tracing the current problems back through decades of austerity, prison staff cuts, and steadily lengthening prison sentences. Helen Fair, World Prison Brief researcher,  provided the bespoke datasets to accompany both these pieces, helping readers contextualise prison population trends in the UK by comparing them to prisoner numbers in other Western European countries over several years.

An Economist leader ‘Decarceration is the key to better prisons’ then followed, noting that rich countries lock up too many people for too long, and calling on them to look at how countries such as the Netherlands (and, more recently, the United States) have reduced their prison populations. 

Even overseas journalists are now reporting on the UK prisons crisis, relying on our data and briefings. The Norwegian outlet Kristeligt Dagblad published a report ‘Outrage in the UK as 1700 inmates released early due to overcrowded prisons’. The piece quoted Catherine saying: 

"The main factor underlying our stubbornly high imprisonment rates is the steady lengthening of prison   terms. This has come about not because crimes have become more serious or criminals more dangerous. Here we make far greater use of life and other indeterminate sentences than other Western European countries. The way we enforce post-release licence conditions also means we are recalling record numbers of people to prison for breaching their release conditions. There are politically difficult questions needing to be answered. What can we learn from countries like the Netherlands, which almost never use indefinite imprisonment? What do we expect prisons to deliver, beyond removing people from society? Are our expectations rational and evidence-based?"