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The Prison Reform Trust yesterday released the Bromley briefing prison factfile, showing a system under enormous pressure and a looming overcrowding crisis. The briefing charts ten years of longer sentences, the growing imprisonment of women, young people, petty offenders, the over-use of remand and recall and the extra-ordinary prevalence of drug and alcohol dependence and mental illness in prison: all coupled with the growing failure of pressured prisons to cut re-offending. In the introduction Juliet Lyon, director of the Prison Reform Trust says: “These facts and figures about the state of our prisons must act as a wake up call to a Government pre-occupied with other things. Prisons should be places that hold securely, and make every effort to rehabilitate, serious and violent offenders. The skills and focus of those who run them should be wholly directed towards that aim, in the interests of public safety. Instead, rapidly rising numbers have reduced many prisons to locked warehouses in which prison officers are called upon to act simply as turnkeys, processing people in transit from overcrowded jail to overcrowded jail.” Prison numbers have quietly climbed back up since the annual Christmas dip. They have now crossed the 77,000 barrier again, putting them on course to break a new record within a few weeks. The Home Secretary, in his speech to the Prison Reform Trust last year, emphasised the need to reduce prisoners’ re-offending by improving their employability, treating drug and alcohol addiction and maintaining family links via a new network of community prisons. Overcrowding hazards all of these ambitions. During the period where the population has grown, and overcrowding has become endemic, prison’s crime-stopping record has worsened dramatically. In 1992 the reconviction rate was 51 per cent, the most recent figure, released by the Home Office, reveals that two in three people, 67 per cent, re-offend within two years of release from prison. Juliet Lyon said “No one can be satisfied with a prison system which turns people out more, not less, likely to offend again. Overcrowded prisons are turning petty criminals into the old lags of the future. Government has neither the time, nor the money, to build its way out of this looming prison crisis but it does have ready solutions to hand to resurrect fines, enforce work and community payback, divert addicts into treatment and the mentally ill into healthcare. It must act now to increase public and judicial confidence in effective alternatives to custody.” NOTES Visit CRIN's thematic page for more information about children in conflict with the law