Anne Owers said that with fewer than 1,800 places left from a total of 79,500, prisons could soon “hit the buffers” and be unable to take any more offenders.
With thousands held in overcrowded conditions, including three to a cell, a further 1,800 would put the system in breach of health and safety laws. If present trends continue it would reach breaking point by mid-September.
“We are looking at a system where prison numbers are rising inside what is already a hugely pressured area,” Owers said in an interview with The Sunday Times. “That may hit the buffers soon at a point where there are not any more spaces. I think the point will come at which prisons have to put up ‘house full’ notices.”
The warning comes at a bad time for Tony Blair, who last week signalled that the government was planning to increase the time serious offenders spent in jail.
Responding to the controversy over judges’ “unduly lenient” sentences, ministers indicated they would curb the discounts on jail terms that serious sex offenders and violent criminals are given if they plead guilty.
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Owers, however, criticised the government for failing to consider fully the impact tougher legislation would have on overcrowded prisons. There are now no women’s prisons in the West Midlands because two jails have been converted to take men. All but 19 of the 139 prisons in England and Wales are within 50 spaces of being full.
The jail population reached 77,785 on Friday, with just 1,715 spaces left. Since the beginning of May the overall prison population has increased by an average of 148 inmates a week, a rate that would see Britain’s jails full within three months.
The Home Office has refused to detail any contingency plans. However, it is understood they may include the early release of criminals guilty of less serious offences and holding of prisoners in police cells at a cost of £363 a night per inmate.
John Reid, the home secretary, has not ruled out a new jail-building programme. But last night he bowed to public pressure and closed 11 bail hostels to child sex offenders because they are close to schools.
According to Owers, the rising population means there are fewer resources for rehabilitating offenders. As a result some prisons are becoming “revolving doors”.
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“I want prisons to be effective,” she said. “I don’t want prisons where there aren’t the resources to deal with the underlying causes of offending.
“But our prisons and the people in them are very fragile. We are close to a tipping point. There’s a kind of a law of gravity about prisons — they go down much more quickly than they come back up.”
Last week Lord Falconer, the lord chancellor, tried to defuse the row over “soft sentences” by calling for a review of the one-third discount offenders earn for pleading guilty. His comments came after Reid criticised the sentence of Craig Sweeney, a serial paedophile, as “unduly lenient”, an intervention criticised as “unhelpful” by Lord Goldsmith, the attorney-general.
Vera Baird, a minister in Lord Falconer’s department, insisted the judge had got his formula wrong in calculating that Sweeney was eligible for parole after five years.
This week Blair is expected to launch an overhaul of the criminal justice system. It is likely to include the appointment of legally qualified “public protection advocates” to counter the activities of human rights defence lawyers.
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It is also thought he will give the police more powers to combat antisocial behaviour, with greater use of “on the spot” justice.
Owers, however, raised concerns about new laws being brought in without the effect on overcrowded prisons being fully considered.
She is particularly concerned by the rise of “public protection sentences”, introduced last year, where dangerous and violent offenders are jailed without a fixed release date.
Last week Blair said that more than 1,000 offenders had been jailed under the policy. However, Owers said: “The impact of these sentences was not planned and prepared for. Prisoners began to appear in far greater numbers than had been anticipated.
“All I can do is tell those that make the decisions what the consequences are. I was in an old Victorian prison the other day with cockroaches and two prisoners locked up in a cell that’s more like a lavatory.”
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The government has already been forced to postpone the introduction of “custody plus” sentences, which were designed to give offenders a taste of prison life. Criminals would have been given between two and 13 weeks in jail followed by probation. But the scheme has been put back over concerns magistrates and judges will prefer to give an offender a short stay in prison rather than a non-custodial sentence.
Lord Phillips, the lord chief justice, has expressed concern about the sentencing regime. In the minutes of a private speech to MPs and peers, obtained by The Observer, he criticised the Criminal Justice Act 2003 for placing further pressures on the system.
The act makes offenders eligible for release after they have served half their sentence but parole boards are increasingly reluctant to approve a prisoner’s release because of the outcry at murders committed by offenders out under licence.
David Davis, the shadow home secretary, said: “A very large part if not all of the government’s problems with sentencing, early release and breakdown of the parole system start with their failure to recognise the need for enough prison places.”
The Tories want to build more prisons to jail offenders for longer. Options include using the £15 billion they think can be saved by ditching ID cards, due to be in 2008.
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A spokesman for the Home Office insisted prisons were not about to run out of space, saying capacity would be increased to 80,400 by 2007.