The new UK Government has already made bold moves in dealing with the struggling prisons system in England and Wales. The first, the appointment of James Timpson as prisons minister, was within its gift. The second, the decision to release thousands of non-violent prisoners earlier in their sentences to free up space in the highly constrained prison system, was all but inevitable. As prisons reached their capacity - in practice far above the maximum capacity for which they were designed - the Government faced a choice. It could either release less dangerous prisoners, or stop locking up the more dangerous ones. 

Intention or not, these people will be released - and attention must turn to what happens next. The data shows us that many of these people will be back in prison - with recidivism rates among people in prisons for short spells of less than a year, actually higher than among those in for more serious offences. 

A great many will also go on to experience homelessness after their release. Spending time in prison can have devastating impacts on your life - losing your job, damaging or ending relationships, and costing you your home. These factors are all huge predictors of homelessness, as CHI’s evidence review on the relationship between prison and homelessness shows. 

Prison also causes people to experience poverty on leaving - itself a major contributor to homelessness as well as many other social ills. Moreover, poverty itself is a contributor to people being in prison in the first place. Some people are in prison for reasons that have more to do with economic desperation than malicious character - for things like failure to pay their council tax. Thousands more are jailed for non-violent theft. We do not argue that these crimes are of no consequence - they are clearly distressing for the victims, and society should take a dim view of them. Nonetheless, the evidence seems clear - if nothing about people’s circumstances change, then their behaviour is unlikely to change - especially as short spells in prison allow for little in the way of rehabilitation and training. 

Taken together, these create a recursive relationship between prison and homelessness. A spell in prison makes it more likely someone will experience homelessness; and experiencing homelessness makes it more likely that someone will be driven to offend and find themselves back in prison. There are encouraging interventions - like Critical Time Interventions and Re-Entry Programmes, where there is good evidence in other contexts. There are also signs of promise, where better evidence is needed, like Scotland’s SHORE programme. All of these and others are described in CHI’s Evidence Note. 

The new prisons minister has done sterling work in his pre-governmental life in helping people leaving prison to find work and forge a stable life, but now that he is in government he must think bigger and broader. Bigger - in that he must do more to ensure that thousands of people being released do not simply end up destitute, homeless or back inside - and broader, in that he needs to lift his gaze from helping individuals, and towards building and acting on evidence that supports all of those people, and not trying to tackle the problem one job, one dry-cleaned suit at a time.

Michael Sanders is Professor of Public Policy and Director of Experimental Government at King’s College London and an Associate of the Centre for Homelessness Impact. 

Vanessa Hirneis is a Research Associate in the Experimental Government Team at King’s College London. 

‍

Read CHI Evidence Note on Prison Discharge and Homelessness

‍