The countries that could solve the UK prisons crisis

Could Texas hold the answer to Britain's prisons crisis? Justice Secretary Shabana Mahmood and prison minister James Timpson will visit the US state next month to learn about its points-based scheme for reducing prison times and see if the UK could follow its success, The Times reported.

Under the scheme, prisoners can reduce the time they serve behind bars by earning points for good behaviour and taking part in courses including drug rehabilitation and behavioural change to try and prevent reoffending. Since the policy was introduced in 2007, the number of people behind bars in Texas has fallen from 152,661 to 129,653.

UK prison numbers hit a record high of 88,521 in September, said The Times, with spaces predicted to run out again in nine months. A forthcoming sentencing review is to examine how other countries have cut their prison population.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

Norway

Design awards are not something associated with prisons, but maximum-security Halden Prison in Norway is "often compared with a chic hotel" for its minimalist architecture, said the i news site. Halden, which opened 14 years ago, is the "flagship" of the country's criminal justice system, based on the theory that prison should resemble life in the outside world to help inmates rehabilitate.

Prisoners are allowed to decide when they get up, what they wear, and how they fill their days, in cells with flatscreen TVs and desks. There is no barbed wire or electric fencing – "and yet no prisoner has ever tried to escape", said The New York Times. Only 20% of released prisoners in Norway commit another crime within two years of release, compared to 60% in the UK, according to think tank Bright Blue.

If the UK does look to Norway for reform ideas, it will be following in the footsteps of SCI Chester in Philadelphia, a medium-security facility experimenting with a "Little Scandinavia" wing modelled on jails in Norway, Sweden and Denmark. The experiment became fully operational in 2022, the results so far are "fascinating", said The Times. Violence and self-harm on the wing is lower than in other areas of the jail, and staff morale has also increased.

The Netherlands

When he became prisons minister with the arrival of the Labour Government, James Timpson praised the Netherlands' system to Channel 4 News for shutting half their prisons.

Indeed, wrote criminology professor Francis Pakes on The Conversation, between 2005 and 2015, the Dutch prison population fell by 44%, in part because of a drop in the amount of serious crime but also because of shorter sentences, an increase in alternatives to prison and greater provision of mental health support for offenders. "We work on two aims: number one, preventing another crime, and then on psychiatric suffering and the social problems that come with it," forensic psychologist Hommo Folkerts told The Guardian.

However, Firstpost reported the Netherlands now has another problem: "its prisons are too empty". As a result, it has leased some to Norway and Belgium, while others have been repurposed into hotels, temporary asylum centres and refugee housing.

Estonia

The Netherlands is not alone in renting out its empty prisons – The Independent reported that prisoners in the UK could be sent to Estonia to serve their sentence. Estonian justice minister Liisa Pakosta told the BBC the country was considering offering to house foreign prisoners in its Tartu prison. "Half of the prison places are empty in Estonia," she added.

Estonian public broadcaster ERR said there are only three prisons in Estonia, due to the increased use of alternative penalties for young offenders, shorter prison sentences and detention periods, and a higher rate of probation releases.