Britain's Prison Reform Trust warned today the United Kingdom's prisons are heavily overcrowded and could be "entirely full" by the summer.
The trust said the previous record jail population of 77,774 could be passed "in a couple of months", leaving only a few hundred empty cell spaces in the country.
"Prisons should be places that hold securely, and make every effort to rehabilitate, serious and dangerous offenders," the trust said in a report.
director Juliet Lyon
"Instead, rapidly rising numbers have reduced many prisons to locked warehouses in which prison officers are called upon to act simply as turnkeys, processing people in transit from overcrowded jail to overcrowded jail."
The report said many people working in the sector were privately predicting that the prison system would be entirely full by the summer.
Trust director Juliet Lyon said overcrowding was due, in part, to an increase in women and young people being jailed, along with petty offenders.
She said magistrates had told her they wanted guidance on alternative ways of dealing with drug addicts or people who were mentally ill without having to send them to jail.
"Overcrowded jails simply don't work," Ms Lyon said. "Ten years ago . . . around about half the people leaving prison were being reconvicted within two years of release. Now we're looking at a figure of over two thirds, 67 per cent."