More than 3,600 people – almost a third of England’s remand prison population – have been held beyond the legal time limit awaiting trials as the pandemic wreaks havoc on the legal process.
The scale of the backlog has prompted calls for more remand prisoners to be released immediately. Some prisoners have been pleading guilty purely to avoid lengthy pre-trial detention.
The figures were revealed in data provided under the Freedom of Information Act to a campaign group, Fair Trials, which has collected accounts of prisoners struggling with conditions as they await trial.
The issue is expected to be raised in parliament, where the shadow minister for courts and sentencing, Alex Cunningham, has called on the government to rapidly increase the number of temporary “Nightingale” courts.
“It is a national travesty that because of the government’s incompetence, justice is being denied to victims of crime, as well as thousands of people who have not been convicted of any crime but are locked up in prison on remand past the legal time limit – often with no trial date in sight,” he said.
The figures obtained by Fair Trials, a legal charity focusing on improving respect for trial rights in criminal cases, were provided by the Ministry of Justice.
They recorded that 3,608 people had been held for six months or longer as of December 2020, and 2,551 people had been held for eight months or longer.
One prisoner who had been on remand since October 2019, and whose trial date had been put back until September of this year, told of being locked up for 23 hours a day, apart from a shower and half an hour of exercise.
In a letter to Fair Trials, they wrote of suffering from PTSD, adding: “At times I’ve really struggled with the isolation as I’m single cell status.” They had recently been making progress in terms of recovering from drug use but a Covid-19 outbreak at the prison curtailed their use of the gym.
Another wrote of being locked up for similar amounts of time, adding: “The conditions were horrible, so much so that I was going to plead guilty to get a transfer out of here … my mental health was suffering and I was severely depressed.”
In September the government extended custody time limits – the amount of time that someone can be held on remand – from six to eight months. But as the extended limit of eight months only came into force in September 2020, none of the people held for longer than six months by December 2020 fall under that extended limit.
Separately, the government’s own advice in October last year said that extending the amount of time unconvicted defendants could await trial in prison would have a disproportionate impact on people who are black, Asian or from other ethnic minorities.
Griff Ferris, the legal and policy officer at Fair Trials, said the justice system was being undermined by the imprisonment of unconvicted people for excessive periods.
“People are being made to suffer these conditions because of the government’s insistence on putting more and more people in prison, and repeated and systematic failures to get trials heard in time,” he said.
“The government must reverse the extension of time limits on pre-trial custody immediately, and implement structural solutions to this crisis aimed at releasing more people, rather than trying find more ways to put more people into prison, which is what it’s trying to do with the policing bill.”
A Ministry of Justice spokesperson said: “Only those who pose the highest risk to the public or are likely to abscond are held on remand – extensions to normal custody time limits must be approved by independent judges and defendants have the right to apply for bail.
“Hundreds of millions of pounds have been invested throughout the pandemic, which has seen outstanding magistrates’ cases fall by 50,000 since last summer, 54 Nightingale courtrooms and the rollout of video hearings.”
