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.
