England’s newest prison opened 19 months ago. It is already 98% full

17 comments

1. We got to fill them with facebook poster and twitter posters

2. It was built to house the overflow, of course it is already full. The spaces were full before they even built it, and the same goes for any prison they are considering building currently. They will need to build a lot of prisons before they have more spaces than prisoners.

3. Isn’t it odd that by not using prisons to rehabilitate people and only house them that they keep getting filled.

4. Assuming the ‘newest’ prison would have the best facilities why would you not immediately use it to capacity?

5. Must be the same as road building, they say building new roads encourages more traffic. /s

6. Do we want empty prisons, I’m confused as to how this is news.

7. Whenever we actually build some infrastructure it’s a resounding success and helps the economy grow. It’s a shame the government never seems to recognise this and build more.

8. We need to start focusing on rehabilitation. We also need alternatives to prison, be it longer suspended sentences, more home detention, earlier releases (with strict licence conditions) and more inmates in Cat-D prisons. The current system clearly doesn’t work and needs a reform

9. I’d have assumed it was full the day it opened since there’s a massive surplus of people who should be in Prison. They even let loads out early recently.

10. Why would it not be full after nearly two years in operation?

11. If the government wants to keep in line with tradition, it should start renting private facilities to act as prisons until it’s costing them billions a year, then use the tight budget as an argument for why they can’t invest in building more prisons. 

12. This shouldn’t be surprising.

    Every public service has more demand than capacity at the moment, so as soon as new capacity is introduced, it’s immediately utilised.

    Think of a new NHS dentist opening. Would anyone be surprised if their lists weren’t full within a few weeks?

    A new orthopaedic surgeon and associated additional beds capacity opens up at a hospital — lists would be full on day 1.

    A new lane on a busy motorway?

    Every public service has pent up demand like this due to the ideological decisions made over the past 15 years to let services fall behind demand.

13. Wow, the police and courts have been busy. There must have been an awful lot of people sending mean Tweets in the last 19 months.

14. >a plan for building 14,000 prison places by 2031

    The current El Salvador leader built a prison with 40,000 capacity in seven months, which is roughly half of the UK’s entire prisoner population. While getting crime down 98%. The glacial pace of everything keeps piling up mountains of problems that never get resolved until the next parliament.

15. It’s full of people making Facebook post that may offend.

16. Of course it’s full, it’s was built to be used ffs.

17. Maybe its something to do with the rapidly increasing population of our country?

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