Remember the Nightingale hospitals? They could solve the prison crisis
Ryan Sheppard • UK • 2 minute read
Image: Oscar Ivan Esquivel Arteaga / Unsplash
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The crisis in our prison system was the most shambolic and scandalous part of the Labour Party’s inheritance following the 2024 General Election. After many years of indefensible neglect by successive Prime Ministers and Justice Secretaries, the UK’s penal system was left on the brink of collapse. At one point in 2024, fewer than one hundred prison spaces remained in the male prison estate, an unthinkable position for a country of our stature. Much rightful condemnation has been made of the position Britain’s prisons presently find themselves in, but very few ideas have been offered as to how to solve this pitiful situation in the immediate and longer term.
What has already been enacted to prevent that unimaginable situation of the prison system going into full-blown collapse? First, the highly contentious SDS40 early release scheme, announced just a week into the Labour government’s time in office, which allowed eligible prisoners to be released after serving 40% of their sentence instead of the previous half. This policy was implemented to give the government immediate breathing room as prison capacity had run ‘routinely’ at 99% since the start of 2023.
We had a crisis not so long ago; why don't we learn from it?
However, it only kicked the can down the road, as from the spring of 2026, this scheme was replaced by the Sentencing Act 2026 – which moved to an earned progression model that allowed offenders who engaged with rehabilitation programmes to become eligible for release after serving just a third of their sentence.
As Justice Secretary Alex Norris has recently remarked, solving the prisons crisis will take at least a decade. The Starmer government had already set the wheels in motion for a ten-year prison strategy and had committed up to £7bn this decade to achieve its 2031 target of expanding permanent prison capacity by 14,000 places. However, the government have acknowledged that this planned expansion alone will be inadequate as the prison population is expected to rise annually by an average of 3,000. More recent solutions put forward by the government have been tame. This includes requesting existing prisons to reprioritise space to expand capacity, which Norris believes will create only a few hundred further spaces. Most of the discussed policies have skirted the edge of the issue.
To temporarily reduce the burden on prison capacity involves taking inspiration from the Nightingale hospitals, the solution Boris Johnson’s government developed at the start of the pandemic as an overspill space if the NHS became overwhelmed at any point during Covid. I have named this proposal the Fry prisons, named after nineteenth-century prison reformer Elizabeth Fry.
Image: Number 10 / Flickr
The premise is that large indoor spaces, such as former military bases and vacant warehouses, across the country would be identified and then converted into temporary penal facilities. Some of these spaces may only be adequate to house low-risk and non-violent criminals, but this would free up hundreds, if not several thousand, of regular prison spaces, easing the burden. Alongside other policies, including delivery on the aforementioned ten-year prisons strategy set out in December 2024, it could prevent further extension of early release under the Sentencing Act 2026. It could also mean that we properly sentence the likes of Huw Edwards and David Coote, who were shockingly spared jail despite being convicted of possessing Category A indecent images of children, restoring much-needed faith in a broken justice system.
The naysayers will have their reservations about this proposal, but if we can find the ability over the space of just nine days during the pandemic to temporarily expand the NHS’ capacity to the extent we did, then with enough will, over a period of months we can do the same in the face of this appalling challenge. Part of the systemic failure this country has endured over recent decades under successive governments has been a lack of desire, will, and an absence of bold ideas. We had a crisis not so long ago; why don’t we learn from it?
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•Published: 25/09/26
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