Senior judges will tell courts to reduce terms by 15% as jail population heads towards record 91,000.UK: Senior judges are to urge the courts to cut average sentences by 15% in the hope of preventing the prison population soaring to more than 91,000 within five years, it emerged.
Home Office ministers were forced to revise upwards their projections for prison numbers after the population inside Britain's jails reached a new record of 76,506 last Friday.
Prison numbers stabilised last year and the Home Office had been hoping that the recent rapid growth would plateau at 80,000.
But the total has accelerated since February and is now running 2,700 ahead of projections.
Home Office figures show that since the autumn the courts have become increasingly punitive with the average sentence length increasing by 6% to just over 17 months.
This has been compounded since April by a continuous increase in the numbers held on remand awaiting trial.
Ministers had hoped that new measures to boost the use of community punishments in the 2003 Criminal Justice Act would temper the rise in the prison population.
The projections make clear that the Home Office is banking on the new sentencing guidelines council, chaired by the [ruling class] lord chief justice, Lord Woolf, being able to persuade the courts to cut the sentences passed on those sent to prison for one year or longer by 15%.
The revised prison projections say that this is the minimum necessary just to hit a best-case scenario of holding prison numbers to 77,380 by 2010. The worst case scenario says the prison population will hit 91,500 within five years - 3,000 higher than the last projections published in January.
Juliet Lyon of the Prison Reform Trust said ministers had been lulled into a false sense of security.
"The stark reality is that over 80 jails are now overcrowded, with many at bust limit, prison numbers are spiralling out of control, conditions are deteriorating and there is a corresponding shocking rise in the number of self-inflicted deaths in custody," she said.
"Budget cuts, low staffing levels and a service demoralised by threats of privatisation is a toxic mix undermining basic decency and prison safety."
The Liberal Democrats' home affairs spokesman, Mark Oaten, said that the government's target of keeping prison numbers below 80,000 now appeared to be a lost cause.
"If numbers continue to grow at the rate we have seen this year, the prison system will soon be in deep crisis," he said.
"Jails are supposed to cut crime through education and training. Chronic overcrowding means prisoners are idling their time away in their cells instead."
Mr Oaten claimed that the Home Office kept changing its mind on whether it wanted judges and magistrates to give longer or shorter prison sentences.
But the shadow home secretary, David Davis, said the figures showed that there were not enough prison places to keep up with the increase in the prison population and claimed that the government's response of expanding the early release scheme was no answer.
By Alan Travis posted 28 July 05
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