UK tackling prison overcrowding

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00:00Shane, the overcrowding of prisons in the UK has been a hot topic for a long time on the political agenda.

00:08And if you live there, you know all about it.

00:11Explain how this will work in practice. So exactly what Labour want to do.

00:16OK, so I dug up the government website and dug this up.

00:21So they do say it's an independent review, but it was commissioned by the government.

00:24So that sounds like an oxymoron to me, for starters.

00:26But anyway, so over the last 14 years, when the Tories were in power, they added 500 places, which sounds obviously ridiculously low.

00:36And over the last 30 years, the prison population has doubled to almost like 90,000 people.

00:43And if you think about how much is that going to cost?

00:45So the average prisoner costs 53,000, nearly 54,000.

00:49And the Labour government is putting aside almost like £5 billion into building all of these new prisons,

00:56which apparently they've said is the largest sort of prison building since, I think, Victorian era.

01:02But the problem is that this is not going to come until about 2030.

01:06So at the same time, by 2028, there's going to be, I think, 9,500 places more than they have to allocate.

01:16So it's kind of like, yes, we don't want to let people out of prison,

01:19but where are you going to put all of these extra criminals coming through the court system?