CEP Senior Advisor Ian Acheson writes: "There’s precious little room for manoeuvre. We are perilously close to a time I can remember back in the mid-90s when governors refused to take convicted prisoners from court because there was no cell space left in their establishments. While numbers at the top fluctuate week by week, the trend only ever goes up, driven by courts getting rid of their backlogs and our tendency to sentence more offenders to longer spells in custody that only make prisoners worse."