While Britain focuses on AI safety debates and weather warnings, there's a crisis unfolding in a place most of us never see: our prisons have become exponentially more violent, and nobody's talking about it.

Serious prisoner-on-prisoner assaults jumped to 84 incidents in 2023 — a staggering 104.9% increase from just 41 the year before. (Source: Ministry of Justice, Safety in Custody -- safety-in-custody-assaults-dec-23 -- 3_1_Summary_assault_statistics)

This isn't a gradual decline. This is a system in freefall. In the space of twelve months, prisoners became twice as likely to seriously assault each other. These aren't minor scuffles — these are assaults serious enough to require the Ministry of Justice to track them separately from everyday prison violence.

Think about what doubling means in practice. A prisoner who might have felt relatively safe from serious violence in 2022 now faces odds that have flipped entirely. The institutional knowledge, the unwritten rules, the delicate balance that keeps prison communities from exploding — something fundamental has broken.

Prison officers, already stretched thin and leaving the service in record numbers, now patrol facilities where violence has become the norm rather than the exception. Each assault ripples outward: medical costs, investigations, transfers, lockdowns that affect entire wings. The administrative burden alone would strain any system, let alone one already buckling under overcrowding and understaffing.

But here's the deeper worry: prisoners eventually leave. Most will return to communities across Britain, and the trauma and normalisation of violence they've experienced doesn't stay behind bars. When prison becomes a place where serious assault is twice as common as it was just one year ago, we're not just failing the people inside — we're creating problems that will surface on our streets.

The timing matters too. This surge happened as the prison population reached crisis levels, with facilities operating well beyond capacity. When you pack more people into already overcrowded spaces, remove stability, and stretch resources to breaking point, violence becomes inevitable. The surprise isn't that assaults doubled — it's that anyone thought they wouldn't.

Every one of these 84 serious assaults represents someone's son, father, brother who was badly hurt while in the state's care. Some will carry physical scars for life. Others will never recover from the psychological impact. And all of this happened while the rest of us debated other things.

The question isn't whether our prison system is broken. The question is how much more broken it can get before we admit that doubling violence rates in a single year means the whole approach has failed.