‘You want a peaceful life as a human being, no matter where you are’ ... Pia Sinha. Photograph: Jill Mead/The Guardian View image in fullscreen ‘You want a peaceful life as a human being, no matter where you are’ ... Pia Sinha. Photograph: Jill Mead/The Guardian Prisons and probation The truth about UK prisons and organised crime: ‘They’re your good lads. Respectful. Keep their noses clean’ In more than two decades in the Prison Service, Pia Sinha gained a reputation as a fixer. Now, as head of the Prison Reform Trust, she’s sounding the alarm about overcrowding and other problems
Zoe Williams Tue 22 Sep 2026 11.00 CEST Share Prefer the Guardian on Google P ia Sinha has led the Prison Reform Trust since 2023. In that time, she has seen a Conservative government finally admit to an overcrowding crisis that had tipped over the edge. (It was in October 2023 that the early release scheme was devised; by May 2024, the Tories had also launched Operation Safeguard , using police cells as temporary housing.) She’s watched a change of government, then a change of prime minister, then Andy Burnham instantly assailed by negative headlines as the consequences of that early release scheme unfolded: prisoners had to actually be released early. “We’re a bit concerned about how [Burnham] has handled it,” she says, in the trust’s scruffy, un-corporate offices in central London, “but that’s in the knowledge that he had a bit of a hospital pass.”
To recap on Burnham’s handling: when he came in in July, he paused the scheme for an urgent review; in August he announced a series of exclusions, further crimes for which people couldn’t be released early, including manslaughter and death by dangerous driving. That solved an immediate problem, that the killers of PC Andrew Harper would otherwise have been released, but had the knock-on effect of reducing the numbers expected to be released by about a quarter. The conversation Sinha wants to have is what prison overcrowding looks like, what it does to prisoners and staff – and what it means for society.
Now 53, Sinha arrived in the UK from India with her parents, aged 14. “I think that’s part of the reason I can adapt from one prison to another: I had to learn how to survive and cope, you become very good at reading your environment,” she says, smiling at the implication that the teenagers of north Harrow, circa 1987, were not unlike a prison population. She studied psychology and economics, went on to do a masters in counselling psychology, and was running a pub in north London when she got a job at Holloway, the now defunct women’s prison. When she got her first prison governorship 14 years later, of the open prison Thorn Cross, she was very unusual – not just because she was the first Asian female prison governor, but also for her manner, which is sunny, personable, enquiring and receptive.
Prison governors – the women as well as the men – often construct a quasi-military persona to indicate that their word is final, and it’s easy to assume that is how it has to be done, since someone’s word has to be. That’s not Sinha’s style at all. But she was unusual from the start, since she came into prison work as a counselling psychologist, to support the prisoners themselves.
Traditionally psychologists were forensic: they saw their job as addressing the offending behaviour, with the aim of protecting the public. In 1999, after a spate of self-harm incidents and suicides, the service had started to ask: “How do y…