Around 1,750 prisoners in England and Wales were recently released early, the first part of the government's plan to solve the prison overcrowding crisis.

Politicians, legal professionals and academics all agree that prisons are drastically overcrowded, leading to dangerous and poor conditions. But there has been surprisingly little discussion of the role that sentencing has played in causing this crisis.

In a recent report, the four surviving former lords chief justice of England and Wales have laid out how changes in sentence lengths and aggressive sentencing legislation have increased the prison population. As they write: "Over the half-century that we have been involved in the law, custodial sentence lengths have approximately doubled and the same is true of prison numbers. The connection between the two is obvious."

Their report shows that while crime has fallen since the 1990s, this is not reflected in the prison population, which has doubled in the same period. They attribute this partly to an escalation in sentences for serious offenses. Particularly, the introduction of schedule 21 under the last Labor government, which introduced minimum terms for those convicted of murder.

More recently, the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022 increased the maximum sentence for death by dangerous driving from 14 years to life imprisonment. And other legislation has increased minimum sentences for crimes like firearms offenses and domestic burglary.

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