Locking fewer people up results in less crime.

So why are we doing the opposite? Martha Gill

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Taking a tough stance has led to overcrowded jails and soaring costs. Yet evidence shows that non-custodial sentences are more effective

Britain's prison system is a puzzle to be solved. We are an outlier: we spend more on prisons than any other European country apart from Russia. The price per prisoner hovers around the average; our particularly steep costs are due entirely to our high incarceration rates - we locked up 139 people per 100,000 in England and Wales in 2024, against a European median of 115. For Germany, that figure is 68; for the Netherlands it is just 64.

The prison population is rising, too. In the past 30 years it has grown by 93%. Almost three times as many people were sentenced to 10 years or more in 2023 than in 2010; and over that time the length of sentences for almost all offences increased. Money laundering, for example, would in 2010 on average get you 20.4 months; in 2023 it gets you 29.4.

If our approach has grown ever more punitive, that may be because it seems to be working. Crime has been falling in England and Wales since the mid 1990s, the very period over which incarceration rates climbed. But international comparisons tell another story: in that time there has been a plunge in crime all across the rich world, even as approaches to justice have varied. In the past 30 years crime rates in Canada have dropped by half, although the numbers in prison declined. A recent report by the National Audit Office finds no consistent link between the prison population and levels of crime.