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The United Kingdom spent approximately 8.4 billion British pounds on its prison system in 2025/26, an increase when compared to the previous year. Throughout this time period, expenditure on prisons was lowest in 2014/15 at 3.8 billion pounds and highest in the most recent financial year. 

Prisoners and prison costs

The prisoner population of the United Kingdom was around 97,800 in 2024. Although this was quite a high figure in historical terms, the incarceration rate in England and Wales, and Scotland has fallen slightly since 2008, although it has increased slightly in Northern Ireland. There is, however, evidence that the government is struggling to cope with the size of the prison population. The number of spare prison places in England and Wales fell to a low of just 768 in September 2023. The average cost of a prison place has also increased, rising from 35,182 pounds in 2015/16, to 56,987 in 2023/24.

Steep rise in prison violence in the mid-2010s

In 2018, there were almost 33,000 assault incidents in England and Wales, with the annual number of assaults increasing rapidly from 2013 onwards. There has also been a rise in self-harm incidents at prisons, with over 79,000 occurring in 2024, compared with only 19,000 twenty-years earlier. The peak for the number of deaths in prison custody was in 2021, when there were 371, or around 4,7 deaths per 1,000 prisoners. Of these deaths, 89 of those in 2021 were recorded as suicides, with the most suicides occurring in 2016, at 124.