Just 45 per cent of people released from prison in 2023-24 had settled accommodation on their release, according to the Prison Reform Trust. Thirteen per cent were either homeless or sleeping rough, says the trust’s Bromley briefings prison factfile: February 2025, ‘undermining efforts to support people away from crime after prison’.
Research by the Nacro charity and the Independent last year revealed that the number of people finding themselves homeless on release had increased by 30 per cent in 12 months, partly the result of the ‘chaotic’ early release scheme to free up prison space and risking a ‘revolving door back into custody’. The likelihood of a drug-related death in the first two weeks after leaving prison is also estimated at more than seven times greater than at any other time.
More than one in five women and almost a third of men said it was easy to get drugs in prison, the Prison Reform Trust briefing states, with 22 per cent of men and 12 per cent of women reporting that it was easy to get alcohol. Seizures of drugs were up by 44 per cent last year – to more than 21,000 occasions – and 2023 saw 1,155 prison staff investigated for supplying drugs. Almost 10 per cent of men surveyed by inspectors reported that they’d developed a drug problem while in prison, while naloxone provision for people on release also remains inconsistent.
Almost a third of women and just under a quarter of men reported having a drug issue on entering prison, with 17 per cent of men and 15 per cent of women who were serving a prison sentence there for drug offences. However, 66 per cent of women and 38 per cent of men said they’d committed offences to get money to buy drugs, and almost half of women said they’d committed offences to support someone else’s drug use. Seventy per cent of people ‘with a self-identified alcohol problem’, meanwhile, said they’d been drinking when they committed the offence they’d been jailed for.
The prison estate is once again facing the risk of running out of places, the report warns, with an increase in the number of people being recalled after release posing a ‘significant headache’. There were almost 32,500 admissions to prison following a recall in the year to September 2024, nearly 30 per cent up on the previous year and an issue ‘particularly affecting people serving short prison sentences of less than 12 months’.
The majority of recalls are for non-compliance rather than suspected re-offending, the document points out. In the year to September 2024, 76 per cent of recalls were for non-compliance, of which more than a third involved ‘failure to keep in touch’ and almost a quarter ‘failure to reside’ – frequently ‘exacerbated by the difficulties in securing stable accommodation on release’, it states.
Former justice secretary David Gauke is currently leading a review of sentencing for the government. Last month Professor Dame Carol Black told DDN that ‘what we haven’t achieved yet is enough diversion from prison, but I’m hoping David Gauke’s forthcoming sentencing review will help that’.
‘The evidence is clear, short prison sentences are less effective than other community sentences at reducing crime, and the growing use of recall is trapping people in the criminal justice system rather than supporting them out of it,’ said the trust’s chief executive Pia Sinha. ‘Further measures are needed if the government is to avoid another prison overcrowding crisis. These should include the abolition of the use of short, fixed-term recalls of 28 days or less; the removal of post-sentence supervision for people serving short sentences; and a transition towards more effective community-based solutions through the introduction of a presumption against short prison sentences.’
Report available here