Ministry of Justice corrects corrected overcrowding figures

Last Thursday, the Ministry of Justice issued corrected figures on prison overcrowding and apologised to Parliament for providing misleading figures.

Unfortunately, the corrected figures were also wrong.

The statement given by Andrew Selous to the Commons and by Lord Faulks to the Lords showed that more prisoners were subject to doubling than crowding in 2013/14.

The problem is that the number of prisoners in crowded conditions must always be greater than (or equal to) the number of prisoners in doubled conditions.

A prisoner is in crowded conditions if there are more people in their cell than it was designed to hold, and doubling means that there are two people in a cell designed for one.

So anyone in a doubled cell is in a crowded cell, but not everyone in a crowded cell is in a doubled cell.

We spotted this while reviewing our article on prison overcrowding and contacted the Ministry of Justice for clarification. The Ministry will be issuing a correction to their corrected corrections figures in Parliament.