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Prisons: Wales needs control of own judiciary from England [1]
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Date: 2025-05
At a Welsh Affairs Committee hearing last December, Lord Timpson read a list of 17 names. They were, the prisons minister explained, “all people who went in there [to HMP Parc] to serve their sentence and sadly passed away in the prison”.
All 17 of the men died last year. Their deaths are not the only indication that Welsh prisons are in crisis. Other concerns include a rising prison population, rampant racial disproportionality, and the fact that Welsh probation services recorded 500 people rough sleeping on the day of their release from prison in 2023/24, with an average of five people leaving HMP Cardiff homeless every week that year.
But the full extent of the problems with Welsh prisons is unknown. Wales is the only common law country in the world with a government and a parliament but no judiciary. This means the over 5,000 men housed in Wales’ five prisons and the 300 Welsh women in English prisons (Wales has no women’s prisons) are effectively invisible, even as research shows their number is growing and the conditions in which they are being held are worsening.
Official UK government records lump Welsh prisons in with those in England – a fact lamented during December’s hearing on safety standards in HMP Parc in south Wales. The committee’s chair, Labour MP Ruth Jones, told how Westminster’s Ministry of Justice has in recent years refused to cooperate with the committee’s requests for any Wales-specific data.
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Wales’ judiciary has been subsumed into England’s since the 16th century, when all Welsh customs and laws were dissolved under the so-called ‘Acts of Union’ of 1535 and 1542, creating a ‘unitary’ system. So complete was this absorption that the legal definition of England included the entire nation of Wales until 1967.
Even after the changes to devolution in 1999, Wales still does not have its own judiciary and cannot administer its prisons as it wishes – unlike Scotland and Northern Ireland. This means valuable information is being lost, diluted in official datasets by England, whose total population is 20 times larger and its prison population approximately 15 times larger.
The lack of information about Wales’ criminal justice system hides an increasingly desperate reality, which may never have come to light had it not been for the efforts of Dr Robert Jones, a lecturer in the Welsh criminal justice system at Cardiff University.
Through Freedom of Information requests shared with the Welsh Affairs Committee, Jones uncovered that when separated from England, Wales has the highest imprisonment rate in Western Europe – and has done so since 2019.
Officially, Scotland holds the top spot, with 150 out of every 100,000 people in the country imprisoned as of February 2025, according to the World Prison Brief database. But Wales was already at 156 per 100,000 in 2021, and its population has only increased since then.
Jones’ research has also uncovered shocking racial disproportionality in Welsh prisons. “Individuals from non-white backgrounds in Wales were over-represented in almost all stages of the criminal justice system,” he wrote in a factfile published in October last year. Black prisoners were more likely to have longer sentences and to be under parole supervision. Jones found that in the 11 years to 2023, 63% of Black defendants were remanded into custody at Crown Courts in Wales, compared with only 48% of white defendants, while in Magistrates’ Courts, nearly a third of Black defendants (31%) were remanded, compared with only 19% of white defendants.
A disparity in treatment is seen in gender as well. As there are no women’s prisons in Wales, the average Welsh woman who receives a custodial sentence serves it 100 miles from their home. Their children and other loved ones will be forced to travel a great distance to visit them, and may lack the means to do so regularly. While it is not known how many Welsh women in prison are mothers to children under 18, with the government having reportedly refused requests from the Wales Governance Centre for this information, it is estimated that around 66% of women in prison in England and Wales have dependent children.
The quality of life in Welsh prisons has also worsened in recent years, Jones’ research suggests. The rate of self-harm increased by 53% in 2023 – the most recent year for which full data is available – with the number of incidents requiring hospital treatment rising by 38%. In HMP Parc, the prison where 17 men died in custody in 2024, the number of incidents of self-harm rocketed by 113% in 2023 alone.
In fact, while Wales has 6% of the England and Wales prison population, it had 7% of the incidents of self-harm in custody in 2023. And the trend looks set to continue; 2023 was the worst year on record for self-harm in Welsh prisons but 2024 looks set to be worse, based on data available up to September 2024.
Problems with overcrowding, self-harm and racial disproportionality (to name but a few) in custody are not unique to Wales; they are at dangerous levels across the UK. But Wales is not in a position to properly understand the issues with its prisons, let alone begin to solve them – and doing so certainly will not happen by, as the current Labour government believes, simply building more prisons and locking more people up.
Welsh data is only one part of the story. Without its own judiciary and an acknowledgement of the separateness of Wales’ own criminal justice context, the prevailing attitude among those charged with tackling crime will remain that the Welsh experience is, as one academic put it, ‘simply [the] English experience with a rather different accent.’
Until that changes, those in Wales’ criminal justice system will suffer. Last month, it was reported that an 18th person had died at HMP Parc. The news came just as the Welsh Affairs committee began gathering evidence for its inquiry into the safety of Wales’ prisons – its fifth such inquiry since 2007. As was the case with the past four, the committee will be unable to solve the problems it finds, and the deaths will continue.
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[1] Url:
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/prisons-wales-england-need-devolved-judiciary-failing/
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