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Beyond Capacity: Our Response to the Independent Review of the Prison System

  • Writer: Lucy Campbell
    Lucy Campbell
  • 6 days ago
  • 39 min read

Beyond Capacity: Our Response to the Independent Review of the Prison System

Experience for Justice has submitted its organisational response to the Independent Review of the Prison System in England and Wales.

Our response argues that the crisis facing prisons cannot be solved simply by creating more capacity. A sustainable and humane system requires fewer people to be imprisoned, greater investment in communities, and meaningful power for people with lived experience in shaping policy and practice.

Drawing on lived experience, research and professional expertise, the report examines incarceration-based trauma, women’s imprisonment, the use of the Proceeds of Crime Act, recall, family separation, rehabilitation, recovery and the harms caused by fragmented services. It calls for joined-up health, education, social care, housing and justice systems, alongside longer and more accountable contracts where private providers continue to deliver essential services.

Our central recommendations include:

  • shifting resources from prison expansion into housing, mental health care, recovery services, women’s centres, family support, education and community organisations;

  • recognising and preventing incarceration-based trauma;

  • developing a genuinely gender-responsive approach to sentencing, imprisonment and resettlement;

  • reducing the use of remand, recall and short prison sentences;

  • strengthening continuity between custody and the community;

  • improving accountability and transparency across private contracts and prison labour;

  • creating meaningful education, training and employment opportunities;

  • involving people with lived experience as equal partners in reform, implementation and scrutiny.

Prisons do not exist separately from communities. The harms produced within them are carried home by individuals, families and future generations. Reform must therefore reach beyond the prison walls and address the social conditions that bring people into contact with the criminal legal system.

We have published our response in full because lived expertise should be part of the public debate about the future of imprisonment.

Read or download the full E4J response below.

Beyond Capacity

Organisational response | August 2026

Experience for Justice’s organisational response to the Independent Review of the Prison System in England and Wales

Experience for Justice CIC

Call for evidence closing 31 August 2026

“A prison system cannot create lasting safety by reproducing the conditions that drive harm.”

Experience for Justice CIC

About Experience for Justice

Experience for Justice CIC (E4J) is a lived-experience-led organisation working to change how knowledge, power and opportunity are distributed across the criminal legal system. Our leadership and wider network include people with direct experience of criminalisation, imprisonment and re-entry, alongside research, policy and professional expertise.

We do not treat lived experience as testimony to be extracted. It is expertise: the capacity to read people and institutions, navigate complex systems, assess risk, mediate conflict, adapt under pressure and identify where policy fails in practice. That expertise should shape governance, commissioning, service design, delivery, scrutiny and research. It should also be properly paid.

This response combines E4J’s collective experiential knowledge with published evidence. It deliberately contains no identifiable personal histories. Throughout, we use “people in prison” wherever possible. The loss of liberty is the punishment imposed by a court. The prison system has a separate duty to protect dignity and prevent avoidable harm. Unsafe or degrading conditions, unmet health needs, the pain of separation from family and loved ones, and release into homelessness should never be treated as an acceptable part of a sentence.

Executive summary

The greatest threat to the prison system is not simply insufficient capacity. It is the continued use of imprisonment to contain social harm, poverty, trauma, addiction, mental ill health and unmet need, while excluding the knowledge of people who understand imprisonment from the inside.

The Review should make a binding prison-population reduction plan and long-term community safety settlement its central recommendation. The prison population is projected to rise from 87,332 in November 2025 to a central estimate of 100,600 by March 2030. Building cannot sustainably keep pace with demand, and crowding already degrades safety, relationships, health care, education and release planning. A credible 5–15 year strategy must reduce unnecessary remand and recall, replace short custody with properly funded community responses, and reserve imprisonment for cases where it is necessary and proportionate. Government should transfer sustained investment from prison expansion into secure housing, mental health care, recovery support, women’s centres, family services, supported routes into further and higher education, meaningful work and trusted community organisations.

Fragmentation is itself a systemic risk. Health care, education, recovery, social care, housing, probation and resettlement are divided across agencies and contracts that do not consistently share information or responsibility. Systems must talk to one another, and the people responsible for someone’s care and progression must do so too. If private health care and education providers continue to be used, contracts should be long enough to recruit and retain skilled staff, build trust, integrate with local services and follow outcomes beyond release. Every provider arrangement should require interoperable records, named human responsibility, proper handovers and transparent standards for quality, equality and continuity.

Inside prison, safety and rehabilitation are not competing objectives. Predictable regimes, meaningful activity, trusted relationships, procedural fairness, family contact, continuity of health care and hope are the foundations of dynamic security. When people spend long periods locked in overcrowded cells with little purpose, the system creates demand for illicit drugs, intensifies distress, weakens the relationships through which risk is understood and produces incarceration-based trauma. The Review must distinguish needs people bring into prison from harms the institution causes.

Women require a distinct strategy. The evidence strongly supports implementing the Corston vision: fewer women in prison, stronger women’s centres and residential alternatives, small local provision where custody is unavoidable, and gender-specific, trauma-responsive support. Prison should be exceptional for pregnant women and primary carers.

A gendered strategy must also reach beyond the two questions explicitly about women. Policies presented as neutral can reproduce gendered harm because women’s pathways into criminalisation, access to money and assets, caring responsibilities and experiences of coercion are different. The Proceeds of Crime Act 2002 (POCA) is one example: confiscation enforcement can carry an additional default term of imprisonment while the debt survives, affecting prison demand, rehabilitation, housing and children as well as the individual woman.

Across the estate, lived expertise must move from consultation at the margins to shared power. People in prison and formerly imprisoned people should hold paid roles in design, governance, research, workforce development, peer provision and scrutiny. Their contribution must not depend on repeated disclosure of trauma or be used as a substitute for properly staffed public services.

Incarceration-based trauma is a prison-system harm

Anderson, Pitner and Wooten (2020) distinguish trauma experienced before imprisonment from incarceration-based trauma (IBT): trauma associated with the prison environment that can obstruct a person’s capacity to imagine and build a future after release. Campbell’s autoethnographic work develops this further, showing IBT as an ongoing threat to bodily integrity, psychological safety and the continuity of the self (Campbell, 2024).

E4J uses IBT to name the cumulative and enduring psychological, emotional, relational and embodied harms produced or intensified by imprisonment. These may arise through violence and threat, constant surveillance, loss of autonomy, family separation, humiliation, sensory deprivation or overload, institutional neglect, enforced dependency, uncertainty and the repeated experience of not being heard or believed. IBT does not end automatically at the gate. It can persist in sleep, bodily responses, relationships, trust, identity and the capacity to plan for a future.

A trauma-responsive prison system must therefore ask not only “what happened to this person before prison?” but “what is imprisonment doing to them now?” It must prevent avoidable IBT, acknowledge institutional harm when it occurs and provide routes to recovery during custody and after release.

Our priority recommendations

  1. Establish a binding prison-population reduction and community-investment plan, with transparent annual milestones for reducing remand, recall, short sentences, POCA default imprisonment and overcrowding, together with resources transferred into community provision.

  2. Make imprisonment a measure of last resort for women, particularly pregnant women and primary carers, backed by sustained investment in women’s centres, diversion and residential alternatives.

  3. Set enforceable minimum standards for time out of cell, purposeful activity, privacy, sanitation, health care, family contact, digital access and release preparation, with prevention of incarceration-based trauma as an explicit duty.

  4. End the use of segregation and anti-rip clothing as default responses to acute mental illness or self-harm; accelerate transfers to appropriate clinical care.

  5. Rebuild the workforce around experience, relational practice, reflective supervision, specialist multidisciplinary teams and stable leadership.

  6. Replace fragmented sentence-planning arrangements with a single co-produced sentence and resettlement plan that begins at reception, travels across transfers, release and providers, and links interoperable records covering health, housing, family, benefits and unresolved legal or financial enforcement.

  7. Turn existing policy commitments on family contact into measurable standards for affordable communication, reliable visits, family-focused staffing and proximity to home, with prison-level compliance published.

  8. Create paid peer and lived-expertise pathways from prison roles into accredited training, employment, governance and leadership after release.

  9. Require prison education, work and training to provide recognised qualifications and real labour-market value, and measure prisons against progression into further and higher education, accredited training and employment rather than participation alone.

  10. Use digital services to increase agency and access, while maintaining non-digital routes and prohibiting unreviewable automated decisions affecting liberty or conditions.

  11. Consolidate and routinely publish comparable, disaggregated outcomes across prisons and providers, including deaths, safety and equality impacts by race, religion, sex, disability, age, neurodivergence, nationality, sentence status, confiscation orders and default imprisonment.

  12. Create a standing, paid lived-experience council with access to the Review’s evidence and a formal role in implementation, monitoring and accountability.

  13. End fragmented provision: where essential services are commissioned, use long-term accountable contracts that require continuity of care and learning, interoperable records, embedded social care, named coordination and warm handovers through the gate.

Response to the call for evidence

Question 1. What are the three most important outcomes the prison system should deliver?

Selected outcomes: protecting the public; rehabilitating prisoners and reducing reoffending; delivering justice for victims.

These outcomes are mutually reinforcing when justice is understood as preventing further harm. Public protection is not achieved only by secure confinement on a particular day. It depends on what happens during custody and after release: whether a person is safer, healthier, connected, housed and able to participate in society, or whether imprisonment has intensified instability and exclusion.

Public protection is also created before imprisonment becomes thinkable. Investment in housing, health, income security, family support, youth provision, recovery, education and community connection can interrupt pathways into harm far more effectively than responding after lives have already unravelled. Community investment should therefore be counted as core justice spending.

Rehabilitation must mean more than programme completion. It requires safety, dignity, purposeful time, education, treatment, family connection, agency and a realistic route to housing and income. It also requires prison not to inflict new incarceration-based trauma that follows a person into the community. A prison that releases someone without identification, medication, benefits, accommodation or continuity of care has exported risk rather than reduced it.

Victims deserve a system that takes harm seriously and reduces its recurrence. That includes proportionate accountability, reliable information and access to well-resourced support, but it should not be confused with making prison conditions deliberately harmful. Degradation does not repair victims’ lives. Nor does it build the capacities, relationships and stability associated with desistance.

Public confidence and value for money should follow from these three outcomes, not displace them. Confidence built through punitive rhetoric is fragile; confidence built through transparency, fairness and demonstrably lower harm is more durable. The system should publish outcomes that matter, including safety, health continuity, family contact, qualifications, housing, employment and reoffending, rather than presenting occupied cells or completed processes as success.

Question 2. What are the three biggest risks facing the prison system over the next 5–15 years?

Selected risks: insufficient prison capacity; inability to rehabilitate prisoners and reduce reoffending; safety and wellbeing of prisoners and staff.

These are one connected risk. When population pressure outruns usable capacity, cells are crowded, people are moved away from families and services, regimes contract, health appointments and programmes are missed, and staff have less time to build relationships. The consequences are greater distress, violence, self-harm, illicit drug use, weaker release preparation and the production or intensification of incarceration-based trauma.

The central capacity problem is demand. The projected rise to about 100,600 people by March 2030 cannot responsibly be answered through construction alone. New places are costly and slow to deliver, while an ageing estate continues to lose usable capacity through disrepair. If policy continues to increase sentence length and use prison for remand, recall and short sentences without a population ceiling, every operational improvement will be consumed by crowding.

Recall already accounts for a substantial share of this demand. On 31 March 2026, 12,089 people were in prison following recall, nearly one in seven of the total prison population. A capacity strategy that does not reduce avoidable recall will continue to generate pressure at the gate.

The rehabilitation risk is that prisons become warehouses: custody without enough education, treatment, work, human contact or hope. That is also a workforce risk. Staff working in permanent crisis experience burnout, moral injury and turnover; inexperienced teams are then asked to manage greater complexity with less relational knowledge.

The system also risks normalising emergency measures. Temporary restrictions, early-release schemes and improvised accommodation cannot substitute for long-term reform. A fifteen-year strategy needs explicit decisions about who truly needs to be in prison, enforceable minimum conditions, and investment in community, health and housing systems that can safely carry responsibilities now displaced into custody.

Question 3. What are the three biggest opportunities for the prison system over the next 5–15 years?

Opportunity 1: Shift investment from prison expansion into community infrastructure that prevents harm and makes custody unnecessary.

Opportunity 2: Institutionalise lived expertise as a recognised and paid form of expertise within prison governance, service design, delivery, research and independent scrutiny, improving the legitimacy, effectiveness and responsiveness of the prison system.

Opportunity 3: Build relational, digitally enabled prisons around health, learning, family connection and planned return to the community.

The first opportunity is to stop treating capacity as a construction problem. The 2019 Ministry of Justice matched study found short custody of under 12 months was associated with more reoffending than comparable court orders. Diversion, women’s centres, treatment, supported housing, problem-solving courts and robust community supervision can protect the public without the disruption caused by short imprisonment. Recall and remand also require tighter necessity and proportionality tests. Investment should be multi-year, locally shaped and available as core funding, including to small lived-experience-led, women-led, culturally specific, urban and rural organisations whose trust cannot be recreated through short contracts.

The second opportunity concerns whose knowledge is treated as expertise. People who have lived in prisons notice the informal rules, pressure points and unintended effects that conventional performance data miss. Paid lived-experience leadership can improve policies before they fail, strengthen legitimacy and create credible peer pathways. Consultation alone is insufficient: participants need information, influence, feedback, safeguarding and prompt payment for preparation, delivery and follow-up.

The third is to redesign custody around the conditions that make change possible. Digital tools can improve access to appointments, education, legal information and family contact, but only alongside staff relationships and offline alternatives. Smaller living units, private rooms, predictable regimes, multidisciplinary health, social care and rehabilitation teams, real work and education, and resettlement that begins on day one would shift prison from containment towards constructive public protection. The plan and relevant records should travel with the person so a transfer, release or change of provider does not force them to restart care, learning or recovery.

Question 4. What are the current and future risks to prison capacity?

Capacity is not simply the number of certified places. It is the number of safe, decent, staffed and operational places that allow access to health care, activity, visits and release work. A cell can be counted as capacity while the wider prison is unable to deliver its purpose.

Current risks include crowding, deteriorating buildings, maintenance backlogs, staff shortages, restricted regimes and loss of usable cells through damage or infrastructure failure. In 2024/25, 21,516 people, one quarter of the population, were held in crowded conditions, and reception prisons were particularly affected. HM Chief Inspector of Prisons reported that most people spent long hours locked in their cells, sometimes for more than 22 hours a day. Space that cannot be staffed, unlocked or connected to meaningful activity is not functional capacity. Crowding also consumes non-residential space: workshops, classrooms, health facilities and association areas do not expand when cells are doubled. These conditions are not merely uncomfortable; they can produce and compound incarceration-based trauma.

Future demand is highly sensitive to policy choices. Longer sentences, recall practice, court backlogs and the use of remand can increase the population faster than construction can respond. The National Audit Office reported that the programme for 20,000 new places was delayed to 2031 and substantially more expensive than initially estimated. New prisons also require trained staff, health provision, transport, education and local services; a building without those is not functional capacity.

Capacity planning also overlooks imprisonment for non-payment of POCA confiscation orders. The court sets a default term when making an order; if enforcement activates that term, imprisonment is additional and serving it does not extinguish the debt. Government should publish the number, length and sex of people entering or remaining in prison through default terms. Without this, a source of prison demand and its gendered impact remains invisible.

Climate-related heat, flooding and utility disruption will make parts of an old estate less resilient. An ageing population and greater levels of disability will require accessible cells, health facilities and social care, reducing the suitability of some existing accommodation.

The principal strategic risk is self-perpetuation: additional places can enable further growth if there is no population framework. Government should publish a binding supply-and-demand plan with scenarios, a safety margin, regional and cohort impacts, and annual reduction targets for crowding, remand, recall, short custody and default imprisonment. Forecasts must be sex-disaggregated: the small women’s estate cannot be treated as spare capacity within a system designed around men.

Question 5. What opportunities are there to address capacity risks or use prison space better?

The largest opportunity lies outside the gate: reduce the flow into custody and the avoidable return to it. Courts need credible, properly funded community options, rapid access to treatment and housing, and timely information about caring responsibilities and vulnerability. Remand should be used only when necessary; recall should be proportionate to actual risk rather than used as a default response to instability or administrative breach; and short custody should be replaced wherever a community response can safely achieve more. The same scrutiny should be applied to POCA default imprisonment, particularly where inability to pay, disputed benefit, coercion or loss of the family home is involved.

Government should establish a long-term community safety settlement alongside the prison-capacity plan. Funding should support secure housing, accessible mental health and substance-use treatment, women’s centres, family and welfare advice, supported routes into further and higher education, training, employment and community spaces where people can build belonging before and after custody. Communities should have power to design provision around local need, with outcomes measured over years rather than through short-term activity counts.

Inside the estate, “using space better” must not mean squeezing more people into cells. Shared cells designed for one person damage privacy, sleep, sanitation and safety. Space planning should protect classrooms, workshops, health rooms, visits areas, kitchens, exercise and quiet spaces because these are core public-protection infrastructure.

Government should audit the estate by function, accessibility and whole-life cost, not bed count alone. Unsuitable buildings should be replaced or closed through a sequenced plan, with affected people kept near family and services. Smaller living units within larger sites can support stable staff teams and relationships. Open conditions and release on temporary licence should be used more confidently for eligible people, with transparent progression and community partnerships.

For women, investment should move from large custodial capacity towards women’s centres, supported accommodation and small residential alternatives. Where custody remains necessary, provision should be local, small-scale and connected to health, family and community services.

Any capacity project should undergo a “purpose test”: will it increase safety, dignity, activity, accessibility, family contact and successful release? If it only increases the number of bodies that can be contained, it is not a sustainable capacity solution.

Question 6. What changes are needed to the design, configuration or condition of the prison estate?

The estate should be designed around human scale, accessibility and a normalised daily life. Large, noisy wings make it harder for staff to know people, harder for people to find safety, and easier for distress and conflict to go unnoticed. Smaller residential communities with consistent staff teams, private rooms and nearby activity and support spaces would improve dynamic security.

No person should share a cell designed for one, and toilets should provide real privacy. Clean water, ventilation, safe temperatures, natural light, heating, sanitation, pest control and timely repairs must be enforceable minimums. Design should anticipate heat, flooding and infrastructure failure rather than rely on emergency responses. Post-occupancy assessment should examine whether noise, surveillance, isolation, crowding and lack of privacy are generating incarceration-based trauma.

Access to nature and green space should be treated as a basic element of humane design. Prisons should provide safe, accessible outdoor environments with trees and planting, recognising their importance to mental health, dignity and recovery.

Accessibility must be built in, not improvised. The population is ageing and many people have mobility, sensory, cognitive or communication impairments. Cells, showers, alarms, signage, visits, health care, exercise and evacuation arrangements should meet inclusive design standards. Quiet and low-stimulation spaces are particularly important for neurodivergent people, but must not become disguised isolation.

Every prison needs sufficient space for health and mental health care, education, vocational training, creative activity, worship, exercise, confidential legal contact, family visits and resettlement. Kitchens and workshops should enable real qualifications and responsibility. Visits areas should support children and ordinary family interaction, with private facilities for sensitive conversations.

People who live and work in each prison should participate in design, commissioning and post-occupancy evaluation. Mock-ups and prototypes should be tested with women, disabled people, older people and neurodivergent people before construction. Design quality should then be measured through lived outcomes, not only delivery on time and budget.

The prison estate should be treated as an opportunity for renewal rather than a permanent legacy of inefficient, deteriorating buildings. Investment in insulation, heat pumps, solar generation, water efficiency, low-carbon heating, energy management, green spaces and climate resilience should improve living conditions and environmental performance. Supervised workshops could involve people in maintaining and upgrading the estate while gaining recognised qualifications in energy efficiency, renewable systems and environmental management. This would turn necessary estate renewal into transferable green skills and routes to employment after release.

Question 7. What are the current and future security risks, including the management of high-risk prisoners?

The gravest security risk is an institution that does not know the people it holds. Dynamic security depends on experienced staff having enough time, continuity and trust to notice changes, understand relationships and distinguish distress from intent. High turnover, detached duty, restricted regimes and constant transfers erode that knowledge.

Drugs, debt, coercion, weapons, organised crime and corruption remain serious threats. Technology will change the methods used to move money, information and illicit items, while drones and compromised communications will continue to test physical security. But supply controls alone will fail if demand is driven by untreated pain, boredom, fear and hopelessness. In 2024/25 prisons recorded more than 26,000 drug finds, alongside over 13,000 weapons and 12,000 mobile phones. A security strategy must therefore combine intelligence and perimeter measures with treatment, purposeful activity and procedural fairness.

For people assessed as high risk, long-term containment without progression can itself generate instability and incarceration-based trauma. Risk management should be individual, regularly reviewed and evidence-based, with meaningful goals, psychologically informed support and clear routes out of restrictive conditions. Security classifications and separation decisions must be explainable and open to challenge. Restriction should never be treated as psychologically neutral simply because it is administratively authorised.

Future risks also include cyberattack, data breach and overreliance on predictive systems. Poor-quality historic data can reproduce bias, and a risk score can acquire authority beyond its intended purpose. No automated output should determine security category, segregation, programme access, parole preparation or liberty without informed human review, reasons, correction and appeal.

Finally, legitimacy is a security asset. Inconsistent rules, perceived discrimination and unanswered complaints weaken cooperation and intelligence. Fair process, reliable communication and visible follow-through reduce conflict.

Security policy must also be gender-responsive. Women’s involvement in drugs, money movement or rule-breaking can be shaped by coercive control, exploitation, debt and fear inside or outside prison. Applying male-estate assumptions without examining those relationships can misidentify vulnerability as culpability and leave the person exercising control untouched.

Question 8. What opportunities are there to improve prison security?

Security improves when everyday prison life is predictable, fair and purposeful. The priority should be stable multidisciplinary teams responsible for smaller groups, with time to talk, listen and follow up. Staff need training in de-escalation, trauma, mental health, neurodivergence, race and cultural competence, supported by reflective supervision rather than a culture that treats relationship-building as optional.

Staffing models must give trained staff protected time to apply relational practice, complete key work, participate in multidisciplinary meetings and follow up concerns consistently. Training without time and stable staffing will not change daily practice.

Drug strategy should address demand as well as supply. Rapid access to evidence-based treatment, continuity of opioid substitution therapy, harm reduction, meaningful activity, debt support and trusted peer recovery roles can reduce the market that coercion exploits. Recovery is not simply abstinence or completion of a programme: it depends on safety, trauma-responsive support, housing, health, family and community connection, identity and hope. Support should be available when it is needed, not withdrawn because someone has relapsed or struggled to comply. Intelligence functions should distinguish serious organised activity from survival behaviour and should be subject to equality monitoring.

Prison councils, peer mediators and paid lived-experience safety roles can identify emerging pressures early. These mechanisms need access to decision-makers, protected time and a published response setting out what was said, what was done and what could not be done. They must complement, not replace, professional staffing or confidential reporting.

Technology can support perimeter detection, secure communications and timely information-sharing, but safeguards are essential. Searches and monitoring should be lawful, proportionate and respectful; digital systems must be tested for bias, false positives and mission creep. People affected by algorithm-assisted decisions should be told, given meaningful reasons and able to correct inaccurate data.

For high-risk people, the system should invest in progression. Regular multidisciplinary reviews, continuity of key staff, access to treatment and education, and achievable stages out of restrictive conditions create incentives for stability. Indefinite uncertainty does the opposite.

Security performance should include trust, perceived fairness, time out of cell, continuity of staff, treatment access and resolution of complaints, rather than only finds, incidents and uses of force.

Question 9. What are the current and future workforce risks?

The central workforce risk is a loss of experience. In the year to March 2026, 6,317 HMPPS staff left and the overall leaving rate was 9.1%. Many frontline staff have less than three years’ experience. When experienced officers and specialists leave, prisons lose institutional memory, mentoring capacity and the relationships through which risk is understood.

Population pressure creates a damaging cycle: thin staffing produces restricted regimes and crisis management; crisis work increases burnout, sickness and moral injury; turnover then leaves even less capacity for relational work. Staff may be physically present but unable to deliver education escorts, visits, key work, health appointments or release planning. Vacancies in mental health, psychology, education, social work, substance treatment and maintenance compound the problem.

The emotional demands are substantial. Staff witness self-harm, violence, grief and severe mental illness, often without adequate reflective supervision. Officers are then expected to fill clinical and social-care gaps for which they are not trained. This is unsafe for staff and for people in custody.

Future risks include an ageing and more medically complex population, greater neurodiversity recognition, sophisticated organised crime and digital systems that add administrative work without improving practice. Over-centralised targets can disempower governors and frontline teams. Short provider contracts create another form of workforce churn: health, education, recovery and voluntary-sector staff are repeatedly lost, relationships are broken and local expertise disappears at procurement boundaries. Separate employers, records and lines of accountability can leave everyone involved but no one responsible.

Recruitment alone will not solve retention. A workforce strategy must address pay, conditions, safety, predictable deployment, professional status, progression, supervision, discrimination and the quality of the job. It should also measure experience distribution by prison and shift, not only total headcount.

Question 10. What opportunities are there to strengthen the workforce?

Prison work should be rebuilt as a skilled relational profession. Initial training must be followed by protected mentoring, supervised practice and continuing development in de-escalation, mental health, suicide prevention, trauma, neurodivergence, disability, gender, race, faith and family engagement. Staff must understand incarceration-based trauma and recognise that prison routines, decisions and uses of power can themselves cause harm. Gender training should include coercive control, economic abuse, women’s pathways into criminalisation and the effects of separation from children. Training should be co-designed and co-delivered by properly paid people with lived expertise, without requiring personal disclosure.

Every frontline worker needs regular reflective supervision and access to support after traumatic events. Managers should be trained to identify burnout and moral injury. Staffing models must provide time for key work, handovers and relationship-building rather than calculating only the minimum needed to unlock a wing.

Multidisciplinary teams should include health, psychology, social work, education, substance treatment, family and resettlement expertise. Embedded social care teams should assess and support older, disabled, chronically ill and frail people, including personal care, equipment, adaptations, safeguarding and transition to community services. Officers should be central members of these teams, not expected to replace clinicians, teachers or social-care professionals. Stable teams assigned to smaller residential units would build knowledge and accountability.

There is also an opportunity to create routes into employment for people with convictions. Blanket exclusions waste relevant capability. Paid peer roles in prison should lead to recognised qualifications, fair recruitment and jobs in HMPPS, commissioned services, research and oversight where lawful and safe. Recruitment should assess present capability and role-specific risk, not treat a conviction as a permanent proxy for character.

Governors need enough tenure and delegated authority to improve local practice, accompanied by transparent outcome measures and independent scrutiny. Voluntary and community organisations need multi-year funding so skilled staff are not repeatedly lost at contract boundaries. If private health care and education provision remains, government should use longer, accountable contracts with continuity, workforce retention, service integration and post-release outcomes written into them, alongside break and remedy provisions for serious failure. Contract length must support trust without protecting poor performance.

Success should be measured through retention, experience, staff wellbeing, relationship quality, regime delivery and equitable progression, rather than headcount alone.

Question 11. What are the current and future risks to safety, wellbeing and decency?

The current position is grave. In the twelve months to June 2026, 359 people died in prison, including 71 self-inflicted deaths. In the year to March 2026 there were 70,632 incidents of self-harm. The rate for women was more than nine times the male rate, while assault rates in women’s prisons reached record levels.

Incarceration-based trauma provides a necessary lens for understanding these outcomes. It directs attention to harms produced by imprisonment itself: fear, powerlessness, separation, invasion of privacy, institutional betrayal, repeated restraint, isolation, uncertainty and being unable to obtain help. These harms may interact with earlier trauma, but they should not be misrecorded as evidence that a person arrived inherently damaged or dangerous.

These figures cannot be separated from living conditions. Crowding, long periods locked up, unreliable regimes, dirty and damaged cells, delayed health care, isolation from family, uncertain progression and release into insecurity all undermine safety. When acute mental illness is managed through segregation, anti-rip clothing or repeated observation without timely therapeutic care, containment is mistaken for treatment.

Future pressures include an older, frailer population; higher levels of disability and complex illness; climate-related heat and infrastructure disruption; and continued high churn through remand and recall. Unmet social-care need can leave people without safe personal care, mobility equipment, accessible accommodation or protection from neglect. Transitions, particularly arrival, transfer and release, are especially dangerous when fragmented providers interrupt medication, records, treatment, education, benefits, housing or family contact.

Decency is not cosmetic. Privacy when using a toilet, clean bedding, adequate clothing, nutritious food, fresh air, sleep, washing and prompt repair affect conflict, health and dignity. People should not have to become unwell, self-harm or threaten litigation to secure basic attention.

There are profound equality risks. Minority ethnic and Muslim men, young adults, disabled people, foreign nationals, LGBTQ+ people and others often report worse treatment or poorer access. Aggregate averages can hide these differences. Safety data and responses must be disaggregated and acted upon.

Question 12. What opportunities are there to improve safety, wellbeing and decency?

Government should establish enforceable minimum conditions, independently monitored and linked to remedial action. These should cover time out of cell, occupancy, sanitation, temperature, food, exercise, communication, visits, health access and purposeful activity. Every prison should also maintain a co-produced plan to prevent, identify and respond to incarceration-based trauma. Persistent failure should trigger a population reduction or transfer of resources, not acceptance of a lower standard.

Mental health care requires urgent reform. Reception screening must lead to timely assessment and treatment; transfers to hospital must meet statutory timescales; and prison must not be used because community or secure health beds are unavailable. Segregation should never function as a mental health ward. Staff need rapid clinical advice, and people in distress need calm therapeutic spaces and continuity of trusted support.

Every prison should have embedded social-care capacity linked directly to the relevant local authority and community provision. Assessment should begin at reception and be reviewed before transfer and release. Personal care, aids, adaptations and safeguarding must be provided by trained staff with the person’s dignity and consent at the centre; prison officers and cellmates should not be expected to fill gaps in statutory care.

Meaningful daily life is a safety intervention. A published core day, reliable unlock, exercise, education, work, creative activity and peer support reduce isolation and allow staff to see changes. Family contact should be affordable and dependable, with functioning phones, video calls and visits treated as essential infrastructure.

Complaint and safeguarding systems must be accessible, timely and trusted. People should be able to report bullying, discrimination, sexual harm, debt or staff misconduct confidentially, with protection from retaliation and visible outcomes. Independent advocates are particularly important for people with communication or cognitive difficulties.

Local safety forums should combine operational data with paid lived-experience insight. Women in prison have shown that peer support, mediation and relational care can be highly valued, but peers need supervision, boundaries and progression. The aim is a prison culture where asking for help is safe and ordinary, rather than a system that notices distress only at crisis point.

Question 13. What are the risks to rehabilitation and reducing reoffending?

The main risk is that the prison environment disables the very capacities rehabilitation requires. Long lock-up, fear, arbitrary decision-making and constant transfer reduce agency and trust. Education, treatment and work are interrupted by staff shortages and overcrowding. A person can be labelled “unmotivated” when the promised course never runs or they cannot be escorted to it. Incarceration-based trauma can persist after release as hypervigilance, disrupted sleep, bodily distress, difficulty trusting others, institutional dependency and a fractured sense of self; these are consequences of imprisonment, not failures of motivation.

Rehabilitation is also undermined by a deficit-only view of criminalised people. People arrive with harm and unmet need, but also with strengths: problem-solving, system navigation, care, mediation, risk awareness, endurance and leadership. If prisons recognise people only through risk and failure, they narrow possible identities and waste capability.

Sentence planning is often process-driven and disconnected from release realities. High caseloads, repeated staff changes and limited one-to-one work mean plans are not genuinely co-produced. People serving indeterminate or long sentences face particular uncertainty; those on short sentences may leave before any meaningful intervention. Remand prisoners can be excluded from activity despite an unknown release date.

Fragmented provision compounds this failure. A prison transfer, release or contract change can mean another assessment, another waiting list and the loss of a trusted health worker, teacher or recovery practitioner. People should not have to repeat painful histories or restart care and learning because organisations cannot communicate. A single co-produced plan, compatible records, a named lead professional and multidisciplinary handovers should connect custody to local health, education, social care, recovery, housing and probation services.

Housing, health, family, income and employment are not “resettlement extras.” Release without stable accommodation, medication, identification, a bank account or benefits creates immediate risk. Transfers far from home weaken family contact and local service links. Digital exclusion increasingly blocks access to ordinary life.

Punishment can also continue through POCA confiscation orders. A person may leave prison facing enforcement, interest, threatened loss of the family home and a default term of imprisonment, while the debt remains even if that term is served. These pressures can directly undermine housing, mental health, family stability, employment and desistance. For women, the harm may be intensified where offending occurred within coercive or exploitative relationships, they did not control the money or assets attributed to them, or they carry primary responsibility for children. Resettlement planning must identify confiscation orders early and provide independent specialist advice rather than treating them as a separate financial matter.

Finally, commissioning can reward short-term outputs rather than sustained change. Small specialist organisations, including those led by lived experience and serving racialised communities or women, face insecure funding. Community expertise is repeatedly asked to repair harms after release while receiving a fraction of the stable investment directed to custody. Multi-year core funding should recognise these organisations as public-safety infrastructure. The system loses trust and continuity each time a valued service disappears.

Question 14. Which prison activities or interventions are most effective?

No single programme can compensate for an unsafe, restrictive and unstable prison. The most effective approach is a coherent environment in which relationships, health, learning, family and release planning reinforce one another.

Priority should be given to:

  • education from literacy to higher learning, linked to recognised qualifications and progression;

  • vocational work that reflects real labour markets, pays fairly and develops transferable skills;

  • evidence-based mental health and substance treatment with continuity before, during and after custody;

  • creative arts, sport, faith and reflective programmes that build identity, belonging, emotional regulation and hope;

  • family work, parenting support, affordable communication, visits and release on temporary licence;

  • restorative and victim-awareness work that is voluntary, safe and properly facilitated;

  • paid, trained and supervised peer roles in education, health, recovery, induction, mediation and resettlement; and

  • individual key work and sentence planning based on a consistent professional relationship.

Prison work should also be transparent. Government should publish a register of businesses and public bodies that contract for work, goods or services produced by people in prison. It should include the purpose and value of each contract, the work undertaken, pay and hours, training and qualifications, and whether it creates a route into employment after release. This would recognise how people in prison contribute to wider society and allow the quality and fairness of purposeful activity to be assessed and improved.

Recovery should be understood broadly and supported as a long-term, non-linear process. Clinical treatment and medication should sit alongside harm reduction, peer connection, trauma and IBT support, stable housing, family work, purposeful activity, identity and belonging. People need prompt access during custody and a warm transfer to community support, with medication uninterrupted and, wherever possible, the same or a linked worker maintaining the relationship after release. Peer recovery roles should be paid, trained, supervised and connected to recognised progression rather than used as a substitute for specialist care.

The 2015 systematic review by Bagnall and colleagues found positive evidence for prison peer education and support, including benefits to the mental health of peer deliverers. E4J’s position is that peer provision is strongest when it develops capability and mutuality, not when it is used as free labour or a substitute for professional care.

Quality matters more than enrolment. Activity should be sufficiently frequent, accessible to remand and disabled people, culturally relevant and evaluated for attendance, completion, learning, wellbeing and post-release outcomes. People in prison should help design and evaluate provision. They are often the first to know whether a programme is credible, safe and usable.

Question 15. What are the biggest risks facing women’s prisons and outcomes for women?

Women’s imprisonment concentrates trauma, ill health, poverty and separation in institutions not equipped to resolve them. The Chief Medical Officer reports that two in three women in prison have experienced domestic abuse and more than half experienced abuse in childhood. Self-harm rates are more than nine times those for men. Treating these realities primarily as security problems can deepen distress and reproduce coercion. Anderson, Pitner and Wooten’s gender-specific model distinguishes pre-incarceration trauma from incarceration-based trauma, while Campbell demonstrates its cumulative, embodied and enduring effects beyond release (Anderson et al., 2020; Campbell, 2024).

The small women’s estate means many women are held far from children, family, courts and home services. Short sentences, remand and recall create churn: relationships, tenancies, treatment and caring responsibilities are disrupted for periods too short to deliver meaningful custodial intervention. For mothers, enforced separation, loss of ordinary caregiving and uncertainty about children can become central components of incarceration-based trauma. Only around a third of women were released to sustainable accommodation in 2025/26 inspections, and at one prison a quarter faced street homelessness.

Pregnancy and separation from babies create acute health and safeguarding risks. Mothers may lose contact or care arrangements. Foreign-national women, Black and minoritised women, young women, LGBTQ+ women, disabled and neurodivergent women can experience layered disadvantage. Women serving long or indeterminate sentences risk being overlooked in a strategy focused only on short custody.

POCA illustrates how a formally gender-neutral process can reproduce gendered punishment. Confiscation proceedings may assess property, expenditure and benefit without fully capturing coercive control, economic abuse, financial dependency, the limited role a woman played or whether she exercised real control over the assets attributed to her. Every confiscation order carries a default prison term. If it is activated, the imprisonment is additional and the debt survives. Enforcement against income or the family home, together with the threat of further custody, can therefore punish children and other dependants alongside the woman.

Staff are frequently asked to manage severe mental illness and repeated self-harm without adequate clinical provision, training or time. Segregation and anti-rip clothing may control an immediate situation while increasing humiliation and trauma.

The greatest strategic risk is building more conventional prison capacity and thereby entrenching it. The Women’s Justice Board is right to revive the Corston vision: imprisonment should be exceptional, with gender-specific, trauma-responsive community services at the centre.

Question 16. What estate changes or targeted interventions would improve outcomes for women?

The first estate change is to need less women’s prison estate. Government should implement the Women’s Justice Board recommendations: early diversion, strong liaison and diversion, sustained investment in women’s centres, residential alternatives, supported housing and problem-solving community sentences. Pregnancy and primary caring responsibility should create a strong presumption against custody, displaced only in exceptional cases.

Where imprisonment is necessary, provision should be small, local and connected to community services. Women should have private rooms, therapeutic and low-stimulation spaces, good health facilities, kitchens and ordinary shared living areas. Design and staffing must support relationships, not surveillance alone. Scottish Community Custody Units offer useful learning about small-scale, community-linked provision, but evaluation also shows that architecture is not enough: unclear rules, limited activity and weak staff contact can reproduce institutional problems.

Targeted provision should include:

  • rapid, gender-specific mental health, trauma, substance-use and domestic-abuse support;

  • an incarceration-based-trauma review of searching, restraint, segregation, observation, family separation and disciplinary practice;

  • continuity of medication, recovery support, social care and community care through reception, transfer and release;

  • specialist pregnancy, maternity and reproductive health care;

  • family casework, child-friendly visits, affordable calls and support to maintain or safely rebuild relationships;

  • housing and benefits work beginning at reception, with no release to street homelessness;

  • independent legal and financial advice on POCA, confiscation orders, debt, assets and the risk of default imprisonment;

  • culturally specific support and independent advocacy; and

  • purposeful education, work and paid peer leadership that recognise women’s existing capabilities.

Women with lived experience should hold paid roles in governance, inspection, research and design. The measure of success should be fewer women imprisoned, safer lives, sustained housing, health and family outcomes, not fuller new units.

Question 17. Which groups have specific needs or vulnerabilities that prisons must better address?

The Review should resist treating people as a single “vulnerable cohort.” Needs intersect, change over time and are shaped by the institution itself. Groups requiring particular attention include:

  • people with serious mental illness, learning disability, neurodivergence, acquired brain injury, substance dependence or communication needs;

  • disabled, chronically ill, older and palliative-care prisoners;

  • young adults, care-experienced people and those separated from children or other dependants;

  • women who are pregnant, mothers, survivors of domestic or sexual abuse, and women serving long or indeterminate sentences;

  • Black, Asian and other minoritised people, Gypsy, Roma and Traveller people, and Muslim prisoners;

  • foreign nationals, people with insecure immigration status and people who do not speak or read English confidently;

  • LGBTQ+ people, including trans people requiring individualised, safe and lawful placement decisions;

  • people on remand, recall, short sentences, life sentences or imprisonment for public protection sentences; and

  • people held far from home, including Welsh speakers and those from rural communities.

These categories overlap. A young Black woman with autism on remand, for example, does not experience each characteristic separately. Assessment and provision should therefore be person-centred and intersectional.

Prison processes can create vulnerability and incarceration-based trauma through isolation, inaccessible information, abrupt medication changes, bullying, repeated transfer or uncertainty. The right question is not only “what need does this person bring?” but also “what risk and harm is this institution creating?”

Data should be disaggregated, while individual information is protected. Equalities forums must lead to action, and people affected should be paid to co-design solutions rather than asked repeatedly to recount harm.

Question 18. What are the biggest changes needed to meet these groups’ needs?

First, create a single co-produced needs and strengths plan at reception that travels with the person and is updated after transfer or major change. It should cover communication, disability, neurodivergence, health, medication, safety, family, culture, education, sentence status and release. It should distinguish prior trauma from harm generated during custody and record what would reduce the risk of incarceration-based trauma. Repeated assessment without delivery wastes trust.

Second, make reasonable adjustments routine and timely. Information should be available in plain language, accessible formats and relevant languages. Professional interpreters must be available; other people in prison should not be used for confidential health, legal or safeguarding interpretation. Buildings, alarms, showers, visits and evacuation plans must be accessible.

Third, match setting and support to need. People in acute mental illness require clinical care, not segregation. Older and disabled people require adapted accommodation, embedded social-care teams, independent advocacy and compassionate-release processes that function. Social-care assessments should address personal care, mobility, equipment, safeguarding, family carers and continuity with the responsible local authority after release. Neurodivergent people may need predictable routines, sensory adjustments and communication support. Remand and short-sentence prisoners should not be excluded from treatment, education or resettlement because their dates are uncertain.

Fourth, protect continuity through systems that talk to one another and professionals who do too. Medication, health and social-care records, learning, recovery plans, benefits, housing applications, family contact and community appointments should survive transfer, release and a change of provider. Secure interoperable standards must be matched by named coordinators, multidisciplinary case meetings and warm handovers; technology cannot substitute for one person taking responsibility. Commissioned services should have contracts long enough to retain expertise and build community links, with continuity and equality outcomes enforced regardless of whether the provider is public, private or voluntary.

Fifth, build independent advocacy and lived-experience leadership into each pathway. Specialist voluntary organisations often hold the trust, cultural knowledge and community connections that prisons may lack; they require multi-year funding and meaningful access. Commissioning should actively support organisations led by and serving diverse communities, including Black, Asian and other minoritised ethnic groups, LGBTQ+ people, Gypsy, Roma and Traveller communities, and disabled people, recognising that trusted support is often rooted in shared experience, cultural understanding and community credibility. Peer roles should be trained, supervised, paid and linked to qualifications and post-release employment.

Finally, publish outcomes by protected characteristic and sentence status, including use of force, segregation, complaints, activity, health waits, transfers, release housing and recall. What is not examined remains easy to ignore.

Question 19. What role should technology and digital services play?

Digital access can return a measure of agency to people whose daily life is otherwise controlled. Secure in-cell or shared devices should allow people to view schedules, make applications, book appointments, access education and legal information, manage approved finances, prepare for release and communicate with family. HM Inspectorate has reported that in-cell services such as Launchpad can be welcomed because they give people more control over information and requests.

Technology must not replace human relationships, face-to-face health care, teaching, legal advice or family visits. Every service needs an accessible non-digital route. Devices and content should support disability, low literacy, neurodivergence and relevant languages, and digital skills should form part of release preparation.

Data systems should reduce repeated storytelling and dangerous gaps at reception, transfer, release and provider change. Health, education, social care, recovery, probation and resettlement systems need secure, interoperable standards so authorised teams can see the information required to act, without creating an indiscriminate central record. This must be governed by clear purpose, data minimisation, strong security, consent where appropriate and correction rights. People should know what information is held, who can see it and how to challenge an error. Digital connection must be paired with a named professional and a real handover: an interface cannot take responsibility for a person.

Artificial intelligence requires firm limits. No automated or algorithm-assisted system should be the sole or unreviewable basis for decisions affecting liberty, security category, segregation, programme access, parole preparation, recall or disciplinary outcomes. Any use must have a published record, human accountability, meaningful explanation, individual notification, independent validation and equality auditing. People with lived experience should participate in design and oversight.

The test is simple: does technology increase agency, access, fairness and continuity, or does it merely increase surveillance, powerlessness and administrative distance in ways that may intensify incarceration-based trauma? Only the former should be scaled.

Question 20. What further examples of best practice in England and Wales should the Review consider?

The Review should look for practices that change everyday culture, not isolated showcase projects. HM Inspectorate’s recent reporting identifies transferable examples:

  • prisons where stable staff–prisoner relationships, visible leadership and reliable regimes create safer daily life;

  • governor-led councils where people see a clear response to issues raised, rather than consultation disappearing into a report;

  • trained peer workers in induction, education, recovery, health, mediation and resettlement;

  • in-cell digital platforms that improve access to appointments, information and applications;

  • family workers, video attendance at parents’ evenings, child-focused visits and practical support to sustain relationships;

  • education and vocational programmes with real qualifications, employer links and progression; and

  • open conditions and release on temporary licence used purposefully to rebuild responsibility and community ties.

Women’s centres and residential alternatives such as Hope Street also demonstrate the value of gender-specific, community-based responses that address housing, health, abuse, family and practical needs together.

Best practice should be tested for equity, durability and transferability. A strong programme running through one exceptional leader or short grant is not yet a system model. The Review should identify the conditions that make it work: staffing, trust, protected time, leadership, funding, local partnerships and lived-experience influence.

It should also recognise the long history of lived-experience-led criminal justice work. Buck, Rive and Rogers show that peer education, prisoner councils, advocacy and participatory research are not recent inventions. Scaling them well requires power, payment, training and feedback, not simply inviting stories.

Question 21. What can be learned from Northern Ireland, Scotland or overseas?

HM Inspectorate highlighted Magilligan Prison in Northern Ireland for strong leadership, excellent staff–prisoner relationships, lower violence and use of force, and substantial time out of cell. The lesson is less about importing one programme than about the whole environment: relational practice, purposeful days and consistent leadership operate together as security infrastructure.

Scotland’s Bella and Lilias Community Custody Units offer important learning for women. Their small shared houses, community links and gender-specific, trauma-responsive aims point away from large institutional custody. Women reported benefits including quiet, privacy and access to some community services. The SPAROW review also records limitations, including unclear rules, surveillance, insufficient activity and reduced staff contact. England and Wales should learn from both: small scale and better buildings help, but culture, agency, staffing and genuine community access determine whether the model fulfils its promise.

Nordic systems are frequently cited for normalisation and dynamic security: daily life inside should resemble lawful life outside, and staff relationships should support safety and return to society. These principles are valuable, but selective prison tourism is not. Models cannot be detached from sentencing policy, welfare provision, staff training and social context.

International learning should include independent evidence and the voices of people held in the relevant system, including minority and marginalised groups. The right question is not “what looks impressive on a visit?” but “what outcomes endure, for whom, under what conditions, and what safeguards prevent harm?”

Question 22. Is there any further evidence the Review should consider?

The Review should examine the harms created by imprisonment itself, not only the deficits attributed to people who enter it. Crowding, isolation, disrupted care, family separation, inaccessible processes, institutional discrimination and release into homelessness are policy variables. They should be measured as such.

We recommend that the Review:

  • publish a population and capacity model showing the effects of remand, recall, sentence length, community investment and new construction under several scenarios;

  • include POCA default imprisonment in capacity projections and publish the number and length of default terms imposed and activated;

  • assess cost per sustained outcome, including the opportunity cost of prison spending compared with health, housing, women’s services and community supervision;

  • publish annual figures showing how much justice funding is transferred from custody and prison expansion into preventative, community-led provision, and what long-term outcomes that investment produces;

  • disaggregate safety, activity, health, complaints, use of force, segregation, transfer and release outcomes by protected characteristic and sentence status;

  • improve evidence about parents and children, pregnancy, women serving long sentences, foreign nationals, neurodivergence, acquired brain injury, ageing and disability;

  • commission longitudinal, lived-experience-led research into incarceration-based trauma during custody and after release, including its gendered, embodied, relational and intergenerational effects;

  • commission gender-disaggregated research on POCA confiscation orders, default imprisonment, outstanding debt, housing loss, mental health, suicide and self-harm, and impacts on children and dependants;

  • examine continuity at reception, transfer, release and provider change, including medication, recovery, social care, education, housing, benefits and identification;

  • publish provider contract length, workforce churn, vacancies, handover performance and continuity outcomes across health, education, recovery and social care;

  • measure unmet social-care need, delayed assessments, access to equipment and adaptations, safeguarding, continuity with local authorities and the extent to which officers or other people in prison are filling care gaps;

  • evaluate recovery through sustained health, safety, housing, connection and quality-of-life outcomes, not abstinence or programme completion alone;

  • publish businesses and public bodies contracting for prison labour, goods or services, alongside contract values, pay, training, qualifications and progression into employment;

  • require algorithmic impact assessments and publish evidence on accuracy, bias, challenge and real-world effects; and

  • study the conditions under which peer and lived-experience-led work produces durable change.

Most importantly, the Review should create a paid deliberative panel of people currently and formerly in prison, with diverse experiences across the male and female estates. Members should receive accessible evidence, independent support and a formal role in testing recommendations and monitoring implementation. Payment should cover preparation, meetings, document review, feedback and emotional labour; participation should never require disclosure of personal trauma.

The final report should publish a response matrix showing what evidence was accepted, rejected or deferred and why. People who contribute should be able to see what changed.

Conclusion

England and Wales cannot build their way out of a demand problem, nor can they punish their way into public safety. Prisons respond after harm; communities create many of the conditions in which harm becomes less likely. The next strategy must make fewer, more deliberate uses of custody, invest substantially in community life and ensure that every day inside supports dignity, responsibility, health, learning, recovery, connection and return.

It must also end the fragmentation that allows people to fall between health, education, recovery, social care, housing and justice services. Whatever mix of public, private and voluntary provision is used, government must commission for continuity rather than churn: compatible systems, longer accountable relationships, named human responsibility and handovers that continue through the gate.

That requires enforceable standards and properly resourced staff, but it also requires a shift in power. People who have experienced imprisonment are not merely sources of moving stories or service feedback. They hold knowledge about institutional life, risk, relationships and survival that the system cannot obtain elsewhere. Recognising that knowledge and giving it weight through paid roles, authority and accountability will make policy more realistic and prisons safer.

The measure of reform is not the number of new places opened or initiatives announced. It is whether fewer people and families experience preventable harm, whether incarceration-based trauma is acknowledged and reduced, whether those who must be imprisoned live in safe and decent conditions, whether staff can do skilled and humane work, and whether people return to society with a genuine chance to live differently.

References

Anderson, J. D., Pitner, R. O. and Wooten, N. R. (2020), “A gender-specific model of trauma and victimization in incarcerated women,” Journal of Human Behavior in the Social Environment, 30(2), 191–212. https://doi.org/10.1080/10911359.2019.1673272

Bagnall, A.-M. et al. (2015), “A systematic review of the effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of peer education and peer support in prisons,” BMC Public Health, 15, 290. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12889-015-1584-x

Buck, G., Rive, M. and Rogers, A. (2026), “Before It Was ‘New’: A Neglected History of Lived Experience–Led Criminal Justice,” The Howard Journal of Crime and Justice. https://doi.org/10.1111/hojo.70029

Campbell, L. (2024), “I Dream of Prison: An Autoethnographic Exploration and Reflection on Incarceration-Based Trauma and Recovery,” Journal of Autoethnography, 5(3), 322–332. https://doi.org/10.1525/joae.2024.5.3.322

Chief Medical Officer (2026), The health of people in prison, on probation and in the secure NHS estate in England. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/the-health-of-people-in-prison-on-probation-and-in-the-secure-nhs-estate-in-england

Crown Prosecution Service (2025), Proceeds of Crime: prosecution guidance. https://www.cps.gov.uk/prosecution-guidance/proceeds-crime

HM Chief Inspector of Prisons (2026), Annual Report 2025–26. https://hmiprisons.justiceinspectorates.gov.uk/hmipris_reports/annual-report-2025-26/

HM Inspectorate of Prisons (2025), Just passing time: A review of work and training in prisons. https://hmiprisons.justiceinspectorates.gov.uk/hmipris_reports/just-passing-time/

HM Inspectorate of Prisons (2025), Time to care: What helps women cope in prison? https://hmiprisons.justiceinspectorates.gov.uk/hmipris_reports/time-to-care-what-helps-women-cope-in-prison/

HM Inspectorate of Prisons (2026), Safety, well-being and hope: The untapped potential of family contact in prisons. https://hmiprisons.justiceinspectorates.gov.uk/hmipris_reports/safety-well-being-and-hopethe-untapped-potential-of-family-contact-in-prisons/

Ministry of Justice (2019), The impact of short custodial sentences, community orders and suspended sentence orders on reoffending. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/impact-of-short-custodial-sentences-community-orders-and-suspended-sentence-orders-on-reoffending

Ministry of Justice (2025), Prison population projections 2025 to 2030. https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/prison-population-projections-2025-to-2030

Ministry of Justice (2026), Offender management statistics quarterly: October to December 2025. https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/offender-management-statistics-quarterly-october-to-december-2025

Ministry of Justice (2026), HMPPS Annual Digest 2024 to 2025. https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/hmpps-annual-digest-april-2024-to-march-2025

Ministry of Justice (2026), HMPPS workforce quarterly: March 2026. https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/hm-prison-probation-service-workforce-quarterly-march-2026

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Experience for Justice (2026), Beyond Deficit: Recognising the Transferable Expertise of Criminalised Lives (unpublished working paper).

Publication note

This document is Experience for Justice CIC’s full organisational response to the Independent Review of the Prison System in England and Wales call for evidence, closing at 23:59 on 31 August 2026. It is being submitted by email as a single report and is intended for public publication. The Review’s question structure has been retained so that E4J’s evidence and recommendations can be mapped clearly against the call. Organisational contact details are provided in the covering email rather than reproduced in this public document.

Artificial intelligence tools were used to support drafting, editing and quality assurance of this submission. All substantive arguments, evidence, recommendations and final editorial decisions were made by Experience for Justice as a collective.

 
 
 

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