14 July 2026
I was recently asked by Irene Wieczorek, Associate Professor in EU Law, at Durham University to provide a “domestic perspective” for her conference International Transfer of Prisoners, Offenders’ Rehabilitation and Brexit. A tall order for a 20 minute slot!
It caused me to reflect on the five key themes that have shaped and defined my experience of practice as a prison lawyer over the last 20 years: political oversight, deteriorating prison conditions, the changing demographics of the prison population, increasingly complex release mechanisms and declining access to justice.
Politics and policy
Since July 2016, England has had ten Secretaries of State for Justice, each bringing different priorities and reforms. Frequent ministerial change has produced an equally unsettled legal landscape, particularly in relation to sentencing and the release of prisoners.
Successive governments have introduced significant reforms to parole, release and recall, often responding to immediate operational and public pressure rather than long-term strategy. The result is a system that has become increasingly difficult for practitioners—and people in prisoner—to navigate.
Prisons under pressure
The prison estate is operating under extraordinary strain. The number of people in prison has doubled in the last 50 years and is set to reach 100,000 by 2030.
According to the Prison Reform Trust’s Bromley Briefings 2026, almost 72% of prisons in England and Wales are overcrowded, with more than 21,600 people held in overcrowded accommodation.
The HM Chief Inspector of Prisons Annual Report 2025–26 describes overcrowding, deteriorating buildings and failing infrastructure as persistent features across much of the prison estate. Cells designed for one person are routinely occupied by two, repairs are delayed, and ageing prisons continue to struggle with basic maintenance. The report found that 70% of adult prisons were “not sufficiently good” (with15% assessed as “poor) in respect of safety.
These conditions have attracted international attention. In 2023, a German court refused to extradite an individual to the UK because of concerns about prison conditions.
Demographics – what about the people in prison?
While the number of people aged under 21 has reduced to around just 4% of the prison population and the number of children in prison is at an all time low, the Chief Medical Officer’s report published in 2025 highlights the rapid growth in the number of prisoners aged over 50. This brings with it a unique set of additional problems that the secure estate is not equipped to deal with.
HM Inspectorate of Prisons reports high levels of mental ill-health among both male and female prisoners: in 2024/25, over half of surveyed men (56%) and almost three-quarters of women in prison (74%) said they have mental health problems. Self-report of this kind is likely to be an under-estimate of the real picture.
Literacy levels amongst the prison population remain significantly lower than in the general population, which is deeply problematic as reading and writing are a huge part of prison life that has to be mastered to gain release, get access to healthcare or make a complaint. According to the Prison Reform Trust, 2024–25, prisoners took a total of 49,186 initial assessments in English. Almost two-thirds of assessment outcomes (65%) were at the equivalent literacy level expected of an 11-year-old or younger —more than four times higher than in the general adult population (15%).
Too many people in prison do not feel safe. In his latest annual report, the Chief Inspector of prisons highlighted that in their surveys at Swaleside and Wakefield, 75% of men said they had felt unsafe.
All of these features make pains of imprisonment so much greater than the pain of the deprivation of liberty, which is what punishment is supposed to be. They also affect the ability of people to navigate their way out of prison towards a crime-free future.
The growing complexity of release
The changing means by which people in prison can be released is probably the most striking development in recent years.
Successive legislative changes—including amendments to automatic release, Home Detention Curfew, recall provisions and emergency release schemes—have created a framework that is increasingly difficult to understand for the authorities and lawyers with unfettered access to the internet and other resources. For those most acutely affected, it is often a cause of great confusion and distress. In recent years we have seen a plethora of changes, including:
- Release for adults convicted of certain violent and sexual offences of 7 years or more to release at two thirds point – The Release of Prisoners (Alteration of Relevant Proportion of Sentence) Order 2020
- Power to detain standard determinate sentence prisoners beyond their conditional release date where the Secretary of State for Justice believes on reasonable grounds that the prisoner would, if released, pose a significant risk to members of the public of serious harm occasioned by the commission of specified offences – s132 the Police Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022
- The 2022 Act also extended the circumstances in which people serving sexual and violent offences are released automatically at the two-thirds point rather than the halfway point.
- Discretionary Friday/pre-Bank Holiday Release Scheme Policy Framework, from November 2023 allowing release up to two working days early
- End of Custody Supervised Licence (ECSL) launched first in October 2023, initially for 18 days, was increased to a maximum of 35 days on 8 March 2024 and a maximum of 70 days on 23 May 2024, using compassionate release discretion under the Criminal Justice Act 2023
- Extension of the circumstances in which 14 day fixed term recalls apply for sentences of under 12 months from April 2024 – The Criminal Justice Act 2003 (Suitability for Fixed Term Recall) Order 2024
- HDC plus 4 introduced by the Victims and Prisoners Act 2024 and Criminal Justice Act 2003 (Requisite and Minimum Custodial Periods) Order 2024, June 2024
- Operation RESET, from 1 July 2024 – removing supervision towards the end of SDS sentences
- SDS40 introduced by the Home Detention Curfew and Requisite and Minimum Custodial Periods (Amendment) Order 2024, September 2024
- HDC increased to up to a year, by the Home Detention Curfew and Requisite and Minimum Custodial Periods (Amendment) Order 2024, June 2025
- FTR48 which replaced many standard recalls with fixed term 48 day recalls for people with sentences of under 4 years, by The Criminal Justice Act 2003 (Suitability for Fixed Term Recall) Order 2025, 833/2025 from September 2025
- FTR56 – 56 day fixed term recalls by The Sentencing Act 2026 (Commencement No. 1) Regulations 2026, from March 2026
- Serve a third, by The Sentencing Act 2026 (Commencement No. 4) Regulations 2026, from 2 September 2026 but with policy changes BEFORE then
As the Supreme Court observed in R (Noone) v Governor of HMP Drake Hall [2010] UKSC 30:
“”It is outrageous that so much intellectual effort, as well as public time and resources, have had to be expended in order to discover a route through the legislative morass to what should be, both for the prisoner herself, and for those responsible for her custody, the prison authorities, the simplest and most certain of questions–the prisoner’s release date.”
Sixteen years later, that observation remains remarkably apt.
Access to justice
Given all these developments, one might think that access to lawyers experienced in advising and representing people in prison would be more important than ever. Yet, the prison lawyer is fast becoming an “endangered species”.
The number of prison law legal aid providers has fallen dramatically despite increasing demand. Financial eligibility remains restrictive, while practical barriers—such as arranging prison visits or video links—continue to impede access to lawyers.
The latest data from the Legal Aid Agency shows that the overall prison law spend for the last financial year is at its lowest since 2003, with just 118 provider offices completing prison law legal aid work in that period. Provision has plummeted by two-thirds since 2012/2013 when there were 353 providers (there were almost a thousand when I first started to practice in this area!). During the same period, prison population and the number of cases referred to the Parole Board have increased. Further, the nature of prison law work has become increasingly complex and convoluted, with more work routinely expected for fixed fees. It is also often deeply distressing work. A very welcome increase in prison law legal aid in December 2025 has very likely saved the sector from total destruction, but it is still fragile.
Legal aid is inaccessible for many people in prison because the financial threshold for a person to be able to receive prison law legal aid is very low. The Government agreed to increase the threshold several years ago, but there is no date for this change to be implemented. As it stands, a person in prison (and their partner, if they have one) must have a combined income of less than £99 per week and capital of less than £1000 for most advice work (this increases slightly for representation at oral hearings).
The nature of the work that is covered under legal aid is limited to issues concerning fundamental rights and liberty. Damage to scope cuts was limited by litigation brought by the Howard League and the Prisoners’ Advice Service in 2017 but there are sill many areas of work that are just not covered by legal aid – such as sentence planning, which used to enable lawyers to help people get the right courses at the right time to progress towards safe release. A lack of joined up thinking means that, even where positive legal reforms are made, such as steps to reduce the stain of notorious IPP sentences, it is often impossible for people to access legal support to make effective use of them.
Finally, even getting access to prisoners is a job in itself: reports by the Association of Prison Lawyers revealed enormous problems in getting video links. As the Law Society reported, Lawyers provided 78 examples, covering 46 prisons, where they struggled to see their client by video-link or in person.
So, what next?
These five themes are all inter-related and troubling features of English prisons today: they call for a joined up approach and structured reform that reduces harm for everyone, rather than reactive and piecemeal change. Happy to discuss…