There are fears that prison overcrowding could lead to a breakdown in law and order and even looting if further action to alleviate capacity problems in jails across England and Wales is not taken.
Justice Secretary Shabanah Mahmood will today warn the justice system is on “the brink of total collapse”, which is “putting the public at risk of unchecked criminality on our streets”, the Ministry of Justice said.
A senior policing source has warned of an “intolerable” situation “which may impact on the behaviour of criminals”, should the prisons crisis spill over into policing.
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If prison cells are unavailable, police facilities get used to house prisoners instead.
There are concerns that criminals could take advantage of the lack of space in prisons, by committing crimes they would not usually, such as looting.
“That would be a very serious situation to get into and unchartered territory that we need to avoid at all costs”, the source has warned.
There are currently fewer than 700 spaces available across the male estate in England and Wales.
Ideally, for the system to operate smoothly and effectively, the prison service likes to operate with a minimum buffer of more than double that – 1,425 spaces.
The source said: “If nothing was done, I would professionally be very, very worried by the August bank holiday”.
This includes plans to release some prisoners who have served 40% of their sentence, rather than 50% which is the current mark at which certain prisoners are considered for release.
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May: Chaos around early release scheme
Once freed, they serve the rest of their term on licence.
A lowering of the automatic release point could mean thousands of additional inmates being let out early – with Sir Keir Starmer not refuting reports of a figure of 20,000 over many months.
The government is also expected to lay out the impact and future of a controversial early release prisoner scheme which has been in place since October, under the last government.
This allows certain offenders to be freed up to 70 days before the end of their sentence.
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According to the Ministry of Justice, Ms Mahmood will visit HMP Bedford and HMP Five Wells – both Victorian-era prisons – on Friday to “see at first-hand the true extent of the catastrophic overcrowding”.
She will also “explain that if prisons were to run out of places, police cells would rapidly fill up, courts would be forced to delay cases and police unable to arrest dangerous criminals – putting the public at risk from unchecked criminality on our streets”, according to an announcement by the Ministry of Justice.
Her plans will “set out why immediate action must be taken to pull the criminal justice system back from the brink of total collapse”.
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The prison service is concerned the way the system is currently being run, with such small capacity margins, is leaving them “vulnerable to shocks”.
A source said: “That can be big, high-profile shocks, like the 2011 civil disorder, like a prison riot. Or it could actually be much more mundane things like an outbreak of bedbugs that would require us to close the wing. We are very vulnerable to shocks at this level.”