Number of British inmates hits record

The number of prisoners in England and Wales has reached the record high of almost 86,000, according to new figures published by the Ministry of Justice.

The figures showed that the prison population topped 85, 578 on Friday, which was higher than the previous record of 85,073 set in October last year and just under 2,500 short of the usable operational capacity of 88,073, the daily The Guardian reported.

Criminal justice campaigners have demanded that the government slash the number of people behind bars, according to the report.

This is while that Prime Minister David Cameron, last month, killed justice secretary Kenneth Clarke’s plans to let offenders who plead guilty out of jail early as “too lenient”.

Clarke had proposed increasing the discount for early guilty pleas from one third to a half in a bid to encourage more offenders to admit their crimes but was forced into a U-turn after the plans came under fire.

The jail population has more than doubled since the early 1990s and Clarke feels the 17-year-old Tory insistence on ‘prison works’ has been unhelpful and expensive.

He made his position clear in June last year when he said that ‘warehousing’ tens of thousands of convicts every year is ‘ineffectual’ – paving the way for more use of community sentences.

“Just banging up more and more people for longer without actively seeking to change them is what you would expect of Victorian England”, said Clarke.

“We will always ensure there are sufficient prison places for offenders sentenced to custody. There is a substantial margin between our capacity and the (prison) population. New accommodation continues to become available and 2,500 places will become operational soon”, said a Ministry of Justice spokesman.