Overcrowding and its impact on prison conditions and health

Overcrowding has been one of the biggest issues for prisons for many years and we highlighted this problem in an editorial of IJPH in 2012. However, it is depressing that this remains a serious problem. Indeed, very little seems to have changed in nearly 30 years. As early as 1990, the Director General of the English and Welsh Prison Service argued that "the removal of overcrowding is an indispensable pre-condition of sustained and universal improvement in prison conditions". He insisted that "for improvement to be solid and service-wide, the canker of overcrowding must be rooted out" (Prison Reform Trust, 2017). Moving on to 2018, Penal Reform International (