Member

Our prisons are, once again, running out of space and it is vital that the implications are understood. If our prisons collapse, courts are forced to suspend trials, the police must halt their arrests, crime goes unpunished, criminals run amok and chaos reigns. We face the breakdown of law and order in this country. It is shameful that, in this day and age, we are confronted by this crisis once more. The reasons are clear. The last Government added just 500 places to our prison estate, while at the same time, sentence lengths rose. As a result, the prison population is now rising by 3,000 each year and we are heading back towards zero capacity. It now falls to this Government to end this cycle of crisis. That starts by building prisons.