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- Herausgeber: Biteback Publishing
- Kategorie: Fachliteratur
- Sprache: Englisch
When Daniel Khalife escaped from Wandsworth in September 2023, the nation got a glimpse into the heart of the prison system, and what they saw there was chaos. This came as no surprise to Ian Acheson, who had spent years warning of the disasters to come. Screwed is the inside story of the collapse of His Majesty's Prison Service, told by someone who had a front-row seat to it all. Acheson went from officer to Governor in less than a decade, and during that time he witnessed the uniformed organisation he was proud to serve crumble into lethal disarray. This uncompromisingly brutal account exposes the politics and operational decisions that have driven our prisons to a state where rats roam freely, prisoners are forced to use slop buckets, violence and intimidation are normalised and it is easier to get a bag of heroin than a bar of soap. Concluding that the crisis is not unfixable, however, Acheson outlines a new corporate culture and mission that puts its faith in the officers who walk the landings every day: order restored, potential rescued, society safeguarded.
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Contents
Prologue
It was around 7 a.m. on Wednesday 6 September. Far too few officers had turned up for the day shift at HMP Wandsworth, a crumbling, grotesquely overcrowded Victorian prison in south London, home to some 1,400 prisoners serving short sentences. The senior officers were preoccupied in dealing with the routine nightmare of up to 40 per cent of staff rostered being unavailable, many of them off sick with stress. With inmates often locked up for twenty-two hours a day, two to a small cell, any jobs available to break the monotony and provide an alternative to widely available illegal drugs were quickly snapped up.
Young Daniel Khalife couldn’t believe his luck. At twenty-one, he had been remanded in custody on suspicion of serious terrorism and espionage offences. Somehow he had found his way to Wandsworth rather than austere high security Belmarsh further southeast, where people accused of extremism-related offences normally end up. He joined the straggling group of prisoners unlocked early by a bleary-eyed catering officer to start work in the prison kitchen. A hot breakfast was long ago consigned to history, but there was still work to do to stretch the £2.70 a day the Governor was given to feed people. viii
Khalife, a former soldier, was about to push his luck much further. He had observed the prison’s routines, often disrupted and undermined by severe staff shortages, and had decided it would be relatively easy to escape. Getting a job in the kitchen was the first step, and he was buoyed by the bizarre good fortune of someone who was a clear national security risk being given a job in one of the most vulnerable places in the prison. He’d only applied for a joke. The security department must have been run by muppets. Quite apart from the access to knives, his catering role put him in contact with delivery vehicles entering and leaving the prison. He’d watched the laxity of the vehicle escorts, the lowest paid uniformed staff in the prison, as they walked behind the lorries bringing fresh fruit and vegetables in. It was the responsibility of catering officers to account for all prisoners in the area where goods were unloaded and secure them before vehicles were allowed to leave. In practice though, the staff, many of whom were younger than Khalife and often looked like they had no idea what they were doing, were either not present or not bothered. The control room was supposed to provide an extra layer of oversight and coordination for all movements inside the ‘sterile area’ of the prison. But it was frequently overwhelmed by responding to a relentless stream of emergencies on the wings.
The staff that were on duty were friendly enough but often struggled to cope with the levels of need they encountered daily. Khalife was surprised by how open they were about their disillusionment with the job. The lack of safety provisions for colleagues; the invisibility and indifference of senior managers; the amount of self-harm, the filthy conditions, the frustration of joining the job as a vocation only to be seen as a glorified turnkey; the fact that every day started with a staffing crisis. All of these factors contributed to burnout and ixcomplacency. And all of them worked in favour of a man just waiting for his chance to execute an audacious plan.
Khalife took his chance to evade stressed and inadequate staffing and surveillance as a Bidfood catering supplies van rolled up to the gates of the prison’s kitchen. He’d been planning his escape for some time, and as the van finished unloading in the compound he used a camera blind spot to slip underneath it. Using an improvised net he’d created from scavenged material that he’d easily concealed from cursory and haphazard searching, he secured himself to the underside of the vehicle, well out of sight. He’d taken his biggest gamble – that the lack of basic security and alertness of staff inside the prison would extend to the gate. This was the time of maximum vulnerability for his plan. The van should be thoroughly searched by staff inside the vehicle lock in the gate complex – the prison’s last line of defence before his freedom. His gamble paid off. Either the mirror that should have been used to search the underside of the vehicle was missing or the support officer operating it couldn’t be bothered to do their monotonous job properly. Either way, the van, with its illicit cargo, exited the prison without any challenge. Khalife didn’t intend to stay in his cramped and dangerous confinement for long. But he knew from just how long it took prisoners to be accounted for in the prison, as security routines frayed and broke for lack of staff. He thought it would be at least twenty minutes before anyone missed him. It would be even longer before the unaccounted prisoner contingency plans were activated and the prison was ultimately locked down. This was more than enough time to make good his escape. He was free!
This is an account of the escape of Daniel Khalife from HMP Wandsworth, and it is as good a place as any to unveil the chaos xand ineptitude that has turned our prison system into a dangerous laughing stock. It may well be that truth is stranger than this fiction. We will know more when Khalife, who was captured by police four days later, is tried for escaping from lawful custody. He faces an extra ten years in prison if convicted and he has pleaded not guilty. Whether or not he is convicted is irrelevant. His escape has highlighted just how much is going wrong inside walled places that we care little about and are prevented from knowing more of by equally formidable walls of bureaucracy and secrecy.
I care about Wandsworth. I was Head of Security there in the mid-’90s, and the conditions that Khalife’s escape revealed shocked and distressed me. The first job of the state’s jailers is to keep people securely in custody. The sequence of what should be impossible failures that led to Khalife’s escape shows what is going on not just at Wandsworth but potentially many other of our penal institutions, which are beset by exactly the same problems. How did Wandsworth descend from a place I worked in where staff were clearly and confidently in charge to a place the writer and former prisoner there Chris Atkins described as a ‘dystopian Fawlty Towers’. What has caused this crash? Is there any way we can return what should be a proud law enforcement agency to effective function? I try to answer these important questions in the next chapters. You should be amazed at the fact that we have so many brilliant men and women in uniform who voluntarily walk into these places every day. You should be angry as I am at the corporate waste, complacency and incompetence that has plunged the service into crisis. You should be enraged at the criminally stupid ideological vandalism and dereliction that the Conservative government of ‘law and order’ inflicted on our prisons. You should be. You probably won’t though. In my xiexperience people only care about the criminal justice system when they collide with the sharp end as victims. But I’ll be grateful if this book can make at least a few more prison reformers. The situation is serious, but it is not yet out of control. For recovery to happen, we need more people to care about the people who often don’t care about others. That’s a big ask. What’s your answer?xii
Introduction
Our prisons are in a terrible state. This has not come about overnight. For decades, the public have been let down by successive governments, just as those working and living in them have been failed. Rising crime levels and a collapse in public confidence in the criminal justice system has thrown prisons onto screens large and small. Documentaries like Britain Behind Bars and Crime and Punishment have mainstreamed the catastrophe of a broken penal system in living rooms across the land. The humiliation of the state, unable to safeguard the jailed and jailers, is broadcast on social media on a weekly basis, horrifying victims of serious crime who, expecting the perpetrators to be securely punished and turned around, see chaos, rioting and drug-fuelled violence. Similarly, the parents and loved ones of those convicted of crimes and the people supposedly in charge will baulk at repeated scenes of anarchy and broken services.
These most recent failings have been driven by a calamitous reduction in the number of prison officers working across a crumbling penal estate. Looking further back, the seeds of the present crisis have included a defeatist attitude towards tackling drugs and addiction, a failure to keep the prison estate decent and purposeful xivand the wholesale absence of effective leadership of what is one of our most vital uniformed public services.
While responsibility for the present mess rests at the feet of the austerity cuts and those who imposed them, the reality is that, for decades, politicians have failed to grasp the importance of ensuring that our prisons are adequately resourced. Prison Governors, who needed to be supported and held accountable for creating safe regimes that move people away from crime, have been marooned in managerial bureaucracy and denied the funding and freedom to make a difference. Employment and work-readiness, two of the things we know have the biggest impact on stopping offenders victimising more people after release, are too often seen as optional extras or subordinated to fashionable offending behaviour courses of doubtful provenance and worse impact.
But even where it is evident, the power of work and employment as a route out of crime is undermined when our antiquated jails are mired in fear, indolence and the cancer of endemic incivility and violence. It’s not just the Victorian penal warehouses in the frame for this dereliction. HMP Oakwood, a large, modern, privately owned prison, has prisoners in it who have reported that it’s easier to get your hands on drugs than a bar of soap. There is a failure of resource in this crisis, but there is also a failure of leadership and of will – at every level.
If there is one resounding message that this current and future governments must take on board, it is that control, order and hope must be restored to our prisons. This means tackling the drugs, recreating safety and supporting the often heroic staff with action, not just warm words. In prisons awash with drugs and brutality, with too few disempowered prison officers simply hostage to xvincompetence, there can be precious little prospect of offenders turning their lives around. With the advent of mobile phones and the enormous market in psychoactive drugs, many prisons cannot even claim to do the basic job they are paid for: to incapacitate criminals. A rampant black economy in illicit drugs – often taken to deaden the pain and hopelessness of custody – sees prisoners accelerated into addiction and criminal behaviour like violence and worse. In 2021/22, the taxpayer was forking out an average cost per prisoner place of £46,696 for this state of affairs.1 If the £3.7 billion a year custodial industry was a business, and the failure rate of its ‘products’ was nearly 55 per cent after less than a year in prison – in the context of prisons, this is the reoffending rate – the board would be rightly sacked.2 But in the public sector there are no such consequences, and a counsel of despair prevails.
Finally, while we are addicted to cheap and plentiful custody, the answer to our prisons crisis is not simply to send fewer people to prison. Recent polling of UK adults found that while some (19 per cent) said the best way for the government to manage overcrowding and understaffing in prisons was to send fewer people to prison, far more respondents (70 per cent) said that the best solution was to build more prison spaces and recruit more prison officers.3 The government has concurred with public sentiment and commenced a (reheated) plan to provide 10,000 extra prison spaces. Since alternative solutions within the criminal justice system are currently limited, with public confidence in community services at a low ebb and the effectiveness of probation services dwindling, we should be neither surprised nor disappointed that the government has chosen to bolster the custodial path. The criminal justice commentariat is largely composed of people who have either left public sector xviprisons with varying track records or who actually have no experience of prison at all, on either side of the bars. What’s more, their monologues of ‘no short sentences’ and ‘reduce the prison population’ are out of step with public opinion.
The public want prisons to work. It’s possible to do this by transforming them into places where safety, decency, humanity and hope are baked into the walls. It won’t be easy and it certainly won’t be cheap, but in the end, if prisoners, including juveniles, over a third of whom in 2022 reoffended within twelve months of release, can be diverted from crime as a career choice, the numbers incarcerated will start to fall. For the moment though, unless we grasp the urgent need for change, we’re all screwed.
This is an angry but hopeful book. I’ve used my experience as a former prison Governor with twenty-five years in the criminal justice system at all levels to examine the roots of the present crisis in prisons. But it’s never enough just to rail against the darkness. I’ve also devoted much of the book to ideas on how to transform custody from a too-often literally deadening experience to the opportunity for offenders to change their lives for the better. Takers can be turned into givers with the right people in the right places doing the right things.
This book is dedicated to a group of people and an individual. It is for the brave men and women of HM Prison Service who put on a uniform every day and try to make a difference at great personal cost in almost-impossible circumstances. It’s also for the prisoner who took his own life at HMP Erlestoke on my watch. We must do better, and we can.
265NOTES
1 UK Parliament, ‘Non-custodial sentences’, Post Note no. 613, January 2020
2 Ministry of Justice, ‘Prison Safety and Reform’, November 2016
3 ‘Control, Order, Hope: A manifesto for prison safety and reform’, The Centre for Social Justice, April 2019
Chapter 1
Do your bird
The prison population in England and Wales today stands at 85,851.1 The offenders within – men, women and kids over seventeen – are detained in a penal archipelago of 121 jails, ranging from soulless modern slums to Napoleonic prisoner of war camps, that extends from the Cumbrian coast to the port of Dover.
These statistics are often brought into service by the industry of prisoner advocacy pressure groups – sometimes known as prison reform charities – that proliferate noisily on the edges of public discourse and policy on why and how we lock up prisoners. The prison service is an entirely demand-led enterprise; prisons lock up those judged to have offended too much or too seriously to retain their freedom. There are those who lament the scale of our commitment to penal servitude. They might be on to something, but, for now, I want to look at these numbers from a different perspective. Eighty-three thousand offenders would fill Wembley Stadium and leave comfortably enough room for the average gate of a couple of League Two teams. Assuming you had enough staff and a sensible reason, you could decant the entire prison population from every outstation in England and Wales into one eleven-acre site.
When you look at the prison population through this lens, it 2becomes possible to see a human problem of scale that must be soluble. Wembley has enough facilities to routinely get this number of people safely in and out, to feed them and keep them safe and even provide them with occasionally decent entertainment. How difficult can it be? It’s when our captive audience is flung into establishments that aren’t fit for animal habitation, let alone humans, that the problems start.
Out of this miserable reality is borne one of the most disingenuous statements in the prison debate: ‘People are sent to prison as punishment, not for punishment.’ I couldn’t disagree more. Prison is, in part, society’s revenge on those who break the law. We need to be honest about this. We elect politicians who enact laws that send more and more people to prison for longer and longer. We don’t care that the system we send them into is denuded of resources and spits out alienated, brutalised people whose future offending, far from even being delayed, has been weaponised by drugs, indolence and despair.
We send people to prison and they are punished for it every day, in every way. We need to stop maintaining the polite bourgeois fiction that we are reclaiming lost souls. The deprivation of liberty is only the thin end of a very thick wedge of punishment. It starts with the cell door that’s missing a handle on the inside of it. From now on, your movements are constrained by the needs of a timetable itself at the mercy of staff availability. You go where you are told, when you are told. Choice is any colour, as long as it’s beige. Happiness might not be door shaped if you’re locked in a cell not much bigger than a disabled toilet (with an actual toilet thrown in as a bonus) twenty-three hours a day, but security can be found in places where you’ll get sliced up with two razor blades melted into a 3toothbrush for not much more than a sideways glance. You are the property of the state, and your arse, vagina and foreskin have ceased to have any operational utility except as storage lockers and security risks. The unceasing 24/7 soundtrack of predation and despair is underwritten by a municipal bouquet of piss and shit and disinfectant. In this malignant circus, saying prisons are ‘as punishment and not for it’ is like saying brothels are only for sleeping in.
We need to be clear, though, that there are people in prison – those who have violated the innocence and safety of others with depraved indifference – for whom it is hard to feel sympathy. I have struggled to be moved by the deprivations of serial killers or child-sex offenders. Terrified terrorists might even be seen as just deserts. I’m certainly not going to pretend, as someone who has been up close and personal with some extremely bad guys and girls, I’ve never thought, ‘Hell will never be full until you’re in it.’ But. Brutality, indifference and inhumanity, either baked into a fucked-up bureaucracy or at the business end of an officer’s boot, don’t work. They. Do. Not. Work. Been there, done that, suffered for it. As they say on Newsnight, more on that story later.
But I’m aware that we will need at least some sort of baseline to measure today’s prisons against, one that makes more sense and is at least more honest than the medicated blandishments that pour out of the Ministry of Justice press office. Many variations on the same lofty aspirations exist in the millions of words expended in Parliament as politicians try to square the circle of a punitive public and a progressive goal. I think one of the best comes from a former Prisons Minister, David Hanson, during a debate in 2009:
I believe that the purpose of imprisonment is threefold. First of 4all, it is to provide an element of punishment, which involves the deprivation of liberty and all the consequences that has for the prisoner. It also, in my view, has to be about rehabilitation for the individual, so that when they leave our care in prison, as they will do, for the vast majority of prisoners, at some point in their lives, they return to society as better individuals. That means that we have to – which is my third point – equip them for the challenges in outside life and help them to potentially look at some of the issues that have arisen in their criminal behaviour to date. That might be drugs, it might be alcohol, it might be a mental health issue, it might be perpetual criminality.2
As we will discover, all of the laudable objectives set out here are mere fantasies unless they are underpinned by order and control – to allow prison staff to do their work safely and to be firmly and confidently in charge of one of the most complex and challenging work environments imaginable. Order and control is primarily about stopping the proliferation of new synthetic drugs that have devastated prisons across the country and created a rampant black market. The drugs economy is the single greatest threat to a culture of rehabilitation in British prisons. The predation, exploitation and violence that attend it destroy hope and break staff who are overwhelmed by their scale.
The present reality of what prisons are for – illustrating the chasm between official rhetoric and lived experience – is best summed up by a former independent Chief Inspector of Prisons, Peter Clarke: ‘New psychoactive substances are still destabilising a lot of prisons and contributing to a huge amount of violence. Some of them are deluged in it. It’s making them virtually unmanageable.’3
5We are addicted to cheap custody and yet we frequently top the polls for the highest spending per prisoner in any European country. How can these statements be reconciled? It appears that we spend more money per head than our European counterparts, but we also lock up considerably more (in UK terms) than any of our neighbours. So, any additional value is wiped out by scale. In any case, the figures are inevitably skewed by our reliance on privately operated prisons to take some of the strain.
Britain joins only Germany and Hungary in Europe in using non-state providers like Serco and G4S to lock up their citizens. The impact of additional hidden costs to private providers, such as the design and build of a prison, can add very significantly to the cost per place paid by the taxpayer. For example, HMPs Liverpool and Altcourse are both male local (multifunctional) prisons on Merseyside serving the north-west of England. In 2016, figures released by the National Offender Management Service – the then state custodial and probation agency for England and Wales – showed that while state-run Liverpool opened in 1855 cost £33,268 per prisoner, its modern private sector counterpart was £50,509. Nice work!
The return we get for this public money investment as I have said is entrenched failure to rehabilitate, which costs society and the next victims dear.
Many of our colony of vigorously self-regarding, self-important but strangely ineffectual prison charities suggest that the simple answer to so much squandered human and fiscal capital lies in unlocking prisons and ejecting those made only worse by our fetish for banging up people who torture their communities (far away from the middle-class enclaves of the commentariat) in foetid dumps. Short prison sentences are bad! They are certainly bad the way we 6are doing them, but surely the answer is not to do away with them, but to make them better. I wrote about the folly of the call to scrap short sentences in The Spectator in 2019:
‘Short term custody isn’t inherently bad, but the way we do it is awful.’ I didn’t expect Justice Secretary David Gauke to start an otherwise thoughtful speech yesterday on prisons like this, but he should have. No one wants people in prison when there are better alternatives that will properly punish them and give them the tools to break away from offending. To do otherwise is stupid. But the debate has been overwhelmed by a fixation on sentence length that wrongly suggests that short imprisonment must always and forever be toxic and counterproductive.
Gauke presented his audience with sobering statistics on rates of incarceration putting us at the top of the league in Europe. We seem addicted to custody in this country, as long as it’s cheap. Let’s try some other data from countries often held up by our criminal justice commentariat as progressive role models. In Denmark in 2017, the average sentence length was between thirty-one and sixty days. In Finland a year earlier, 40 per cent of all sentenced prisoners had served at most three months. Norway’s average prison sentence is just eight months. Why are we unable to send people to prison for short sentences here without making them worse?
To be fair, all three of these countries lock up significantly fewer of their citizens as a proportion of their population and are (in sentencing terms) less punitive than we are. But they still manage to make short-term custody a useful response to unacceptable behaviour as their much lower reoffending rates will testify. 7
Critics of the British ‘bang-’em-up’ school of crime theory are also largely silent on the inconvenient fact that many prison first timers have already been frequent flyers in our creaking criminal justice system; despairing magistrates finally crack after exhausting every community penalty available to them without success. Having a hollowed out probation system, destroyed by a lethal combination of wonkery and cuts doesn’t help either.
So, why are we so bad at dealing with people who continually offend and don’t seem to want to stop? Let me count the ways. Primarily, if you want to disrupt offending, particularly low-level acquisitive crime linked to drug addiction – the boomtown of incarceration – you don’t send convicted prisoners into dystopian hellholes. The collapse of almost every metric of decency, safety and humanity in prisons is an appalling indictment of government policy weaponised by corporate incompetence. There’s no way around this. A huge contributor here is cuts. Slashing the numbers of prison staff on the landings has created an environment where it is often not clear who is in charge, never mind whether there is a regime, basic services or, God forbid, rehabilitation. Nowhere is this more apparent than in many of our overcrowded local prisons, home to the majority of short-term offenders, where there are incidents such as the one recently observed by the Chief Inspector of Prisons at HMP Bedford:
Prisoners became very angry, noisy and challenging and refused to comply with staff when directed to lock up. Staff struggled to deal with the incident, and appeared not to know what to do. 8Supervisors were not in control. For a period of an hour and a half, prisoners made unreasonable demands and many of them were acceded to.4
The lack of suitable and sufficient prison officers, clearly and confidently in charge, has contributed to rocketing, record levels of violence and self-harm. Gauke accepted that the latest (woeful) safety statistics were ‘disturbing’. On the bridge of HMS Good Intentions, he opines on sentence reform. In the engine room, his excellent Prisons Minister, Rory Stewart, tries to sweat a few more miles from knackered engines. If you want prisons to be places of reform in the here and now, if you want to truly stop prisoners serving both short and long sentences from reoffending, abstractions and think pieces won’t help. The situation is that we have broken staff running broken regimes. The issue is not the sentence length. The issue is where the sentence is being served.
So what can we do to meet the needs of public protection, punishment and rehabilitation? It’s absolutely true that we send far too many people to custody who are more nuisance than physical threat. But the problem is that these people do still disrupt their neighbourhoods. A lack of effective sanction for their behaviour only encourages them and demoralises poor communities. There are, let’s be blunt, places in our country, denuded of community policing and authority, where lawfulness is not entrenched behaviour. Removing the threat of a short sentence would not help this situation. If you want to cut the dismal supply chain of feckless and impulsive young men from the wrong side of the tracks to custody and back again, there needs to first be a state-led, strategic intervention to dig them out of normalised criminality. That’s a lot more 9than scrapping short sentences will do. Sometimes, however, a short or lenient sentence will be the most appropriate way of dealing with wrongdoing and protecting the public. What then?
Well, we could explore why Scandinavian countries are so much more successful at short sentences than we are. Prison is a place that is uniquely suited to breaking offending behaviour and getting services around offenders to help them rescue their potential and stop victimising others. We ought to pay much more attention to the distinction between those who are in prison because they can’t comply with services and support around them and those who are in there because they won’t. We need a new generation of ‘enterprise’ prisons that are solely focused on getting those who are motivated into employment after release. Secure, small-scale, community-led detox facilities could do so much more than the bleak penal warehouses that too often accelerate addiction into suicide. There is so much we could do to make a short sentence work. But, as Gauke says in his speech, the public always want to prioritise hospitals over criminal justice. Which works well as a theory until it’s you in A&E, victim to someone bad and made worse after a brief stint in our blighted prisons.
We can either have more resources or fewer prisoners. Doing neither well perpetuates the problem. Brand-new mega prisons like HMP Five Wells, part of the government’s plan to build itself out of a population crisis, are themselves plunged into crisis because of violence and recruitment failures. Part of the problem is that these prisons are additions to, not replacements for, our Victorian dungeons.
We need some honesty and clarity from government. Sending non-violent prisoners who are addicted to drugs to prison for 10acquisitive offences (driven by chemical dependency) fails the test of even performative ‘toughness’. Local jails are filled with such people, jamming up the system, being made worse, sent out to the homelessness from whence many came, back in again days, sometimes hours after the discharge grant fix runs out. If we replaced a criminal justice response with secure treatment custody in an NHS facility, I estimate we could divert about 5,000 people a year from a criminal justice route that makes them better criminals. This would still have the effect of detaining people who torture communities and close down shops in poor neighbourhoods overwhelmed by shop theft. But in my view it would open up the possibilities for long-term desistance from the criminal activity that wrecks the lives of addicts and blights neighbourhoods.
NOTES
1 Georgina Sturge, Helena Carthew, ‘UK Prison Population Statistics’, House of Commons Library, 8 September 2023
2 UK Parliament, ‘Role of the Prison Officer – Justice Committee’, 3 November 2009
3 Martin Bentham, ‘Jail spiceheads “out of control”, inmate warns chief inspector of prisons as he calls for better security at jails’, The Standard, 28 September 2017
4 Peter Clarke, ‘Urgent Notification: HM Prison Bedford’, HM Inspectorate of Prisons, 12 September 2018
Chapter 2
Resistance is useful
Everyone should want our prisons to work, and there is plenty of research evidence to show they can, when properly resourced and well led. However, our criminal justice system as currently constituted is a dismal conveyor belt that delivers citizens to custody when they have offended against us to an extent or with such frequency that the judiciary have no choice but to lock them up. Prisoners find themselves on this path for a variety of reasons, but poor choices, personal chaos and social breakdown are very often factors in their personal failure.
The one unarguable feature of a prison is that it can incapacitate offenders in one reachable place: in doing so, it should at least arrest their offending and descent into worse criminality. Incapacitation from offending offers a unique opportunity for them to take responsibility for their criminal behaviour and to develop the social, educational and employment skills they need to become useful members of society, leading crime-free lives on release.
Unfortunately, our current prison system seems to catalyse rather than remedy the very conditions that create offending. Squalor, 12indolence and brutality have become normalised within the walls of many of our jails – particularly those local and medium security establishments that deal with short-term offenders.
Ruinous cuts, inflicted on frontline staff as the prison population increased, have made a mockery of a rehabilitation culture when staff routinely suffer serious assaults and cannot themselves feel safe at work, let alone be able to deal with record levels of prisoner distress and suicide.
The discourse around the problems of and solutions to a deeply dysfunctional prison system follows a typical pattern that has become both too politicised and too simplistic. This is a crisis made both in government and in Whitehall.
Staff cuts were manifestly far too deep and far too fast. Without much humility, there has been at least some acknowledgement of this mistaken strategy evidenced by the much trailed, but only recently fulfilled, promise to recruit 2,500 officers back into our prisons. These new staff have to replace and do the jobs of the approximately 7,000 officers lost since 2010. You do the math.
The government has now reached this modest target, but it masks an enormous loss of experience in jail craft and working with offenders. Moreover, the attrition rates of newly recruited staff, thrown into one of the most hostile work environments imaginable, is a profound waste of public money and potential. Many of them never make it out of probation before leaving in despair. At the latest official estimate, more than a quarter of all newly recruited prison staff leave their jobs within twelve months of joining.1 When you’re a poorly paid punchbag with neither the tools to keep safe nor the leadership to have your back, it’s no wonder similar but better-paid vacancies in Border Force, the police or even Lidl 13begin to look attractive. When asked their primary reason for leaving, respondents were evenly split between poor pay and what the prison officers union, the POA, calls ‘the most violent workplace in western Europe’.
Meanwhile, a simplistic fixation from some on reducing the numbers of prisoners – held out by some as the only response to spiralling disorder – is extremely risky, given the parlous state of community supervision and public reaction when, inevitably, something terrible happens involving offenders who should have been properly monitored and treated.
Moreover, calls for better use of community penalties often imply that custody is the first sentence given to offenders. The reality is that half of all those receiving immediate prison sentences last year had at least fifteen previous convictions, and of the 69,247 immediate prison sentences handed out last year, just 6,171 went to first-time offenders, of which one in four were sex offenders. Other research has also found that large numbers of offenders have failed as many as five community penalties before exasperated magistrates reach for custody.
Changing the ratios – more staff or fewer prisoners – has lately become a political and fiscal cul-de-sac. We cannot allow this inertia to smother the need for radical reform. Moreover, as we have seen from recent scandals, including the ‘worst inspection report ever written’ on HMP Liverpool, a remote, secretive and arrogant HQ management culture in HM Prison and Probation Service is also culpable in operating a system where fashionable ideology often trumps common sense.
The restoration of decisive and effective leadership from top to bottom is long overdue. The sacking of the Chief Executive of HM 14Prison and Probation Service in early 2019 and the commencement of the then Prisons Minister Rory Stewart’s ‘10 Prisons Project’ to try to bring down violence in some of our most unsafe jails, while both welcome and necessary, are not sufficient conditions for improvement.
The human cost of this failure has not just been felt by prisoners. The men and women who put on uniforms every day and go on the wings and landings continue to face working conditions that no other workers would tolerate. They also happen to know more than anyone about the people in their care, but, despite their dedication, are rarely if ever consulted, recognised, or supported in the vital work they do.
The last annual report from the forerunner to the re-badged HM Prison and Probation Service sums up perfectly how we have come to find ourselves with an unsafe and unjust prison system. They believe that ‘for prisons to be positive places in which to work there must be a strong rehabilitative culture across all activity within prisons’.2
Who could argue with this pious declaration? But empty rhetoric is no substitute for the decisive action required to return prisons to a state where real rehabilitation can actually happen. This is the entire purpose of the corporate management of HM Prison and Probation Service. Frontline prison staff are the engine of the change we need to see in prisoners. Enabling them to do their jobs safely and effectively is the starting point for this to happen. Many of the solutions you will read about in this book are based on enabling the men and women who spend the most time with prisoners to realise their potential to assist offenders into crime-free lives. If you’re looking for academic theorising, you need your money back. 15
It is a grim paradox that in an age that seeks to be progressive, prisons, prisoners and staff have far less ability or scope to take risks to change behaviour than at any time since the mid-’90s. The trajectory of penal failure in the modern era starts in the chapel of HM Prison Manchester, or Strangeways as it is better known, on April Fool’s Day, 1990.
The Strangeways riot lasted for twenty-five days and convulsed most of England’s prison system, with copycat serious disturbances spreading to two dozen other jails. It is the most serious and long-lasting indiscipline in British penal history. The failure of authorities to get a grip on the spreading chaos was laid bare on the national media. One prisoner died, scores of staff were injured, thousands of prisoners were moved around the country and into temporary police cells and Strangeways was virtually destroyed with a repair bill of £55 million. A major inquiry led by a former judge and life Peer, Harry Woolf, made wide-ranging and sweeping recommendations to prevent a recurrence. We will return in detail to his report, but for now we’ll fast forward to 2016, when riots at Bedford, Lewes and Swaleside and Birmingham prisons – leaving millions of pounds of damage and dislocation – are shown to contain a depressingly similar cocktail of failures: the chief ingredients being too many prisoners in appalling conditions with too few staff to be effectively in charge.
In all of these examples, disturbances were sparked by a lack of control. Control is the fulcrum on which turn dramatic events.
In Strangeways on that fateful morning of Sunday 1 April, 309 prisoners gathered in the prison chapel for their usual Christian service. The usual complement of eight staff to supervise them had been boosted on that day after an anonymous tip-off of a possible 16disturbance. When the chaplain stood to announce the final hymn, one prisoner made his way down the aisle, seized the microphone from him and began to speak to the congregation about conditions in the prison. The chaplain tried to seize the microphone back. The riot began.
Within sixty minutes of the start of the disturbance, all prison staff had withdrawn from the prison and every wing was in the control of prisoners. The conflagration started in a Sunday service spread to other prisons, frequently as a contagion from angry prisoners who were evacuated from prisons consumed by a display of defiance and rage that caught the prison service and their political masters completely by surprise.
The riots happened in a system that was badly overcrowded and grotesquely underfunded, with the majority of prisoners still ‘slopping out’ – forced to defecate and urinate into a bucket when they were locked in their cells for long periods of time, as was typically the case in 1990. The environment was dehumanising for everyone exposed to it, as was detailed in the landmark inquiry that followed. In Parliament, the report’s findings did not hold back in their criticism:
Living conditions are filthy, with cockroaches, rats, and other vermin widespread, and blood, vomit, and faeces left unattended. Much of the accommodation is, quite frankly, decrepit, with broken toilets, windows, and observation panels evident in almost every cell. It’s difficult to see how we can hope to rehabilitate anyone in such surroundings, a problem made worse by the entirely inadequate provision of purposeful activities for inmates. Such abject failure, bordering on negligence, forces us to question what more can be done.3
17Only joking! The above comments were made by the Chair of the House of Commons Justice Select Committee, Bob Neill MP, regarding HMP Birmingham, two years after a riot in 2016 that wrecked two wings and cost the taxpayer and the private contractor that ran the establishment north of £7 million. That riot was the worst since Strangeways. Here, below, is a summary of the Woolf Report’s findings from Hansard. Plus ça change…
The effects of overcrowding at Strangeways and elsewhere were many and serious. Prisoners were held three to a cell without sanitation or washing facilities. They were allowed just one shower a week. They were forced to share a single bucket for a toilet. With too few staff and too many prisoners, there was a lack of purposeful activity for prisoners. They were locked up and left idle, often for 23 hours a day. There was a lack of decent visiting facilities, so contact between prisoners and families was severely limited. There was low morale among prison officers and when prisoners had grievances – they had many – the arrangements for addressing them were inadequate.
When Birmingham rioted, an internal report commissioned into it and leaked to me continues to link these two seminal events a quarter of a century apart with unhappy similarities: ‘We formed the view that staff had, over the preceding year and especially the preceding few months become worn down by the chronic staff shortages at HMP Birmingham…’4
While the similarities are striking, the differences between the penal landscape of Strangeways in 1990 and Birmingham in 2016 are also worth recording. In 1990 the prison population in England and 18Wales stood at around 45,000 with 20,000 prison officers looking after them. Twenty-six years later, as years of austerity-driven cuts to frontline staff were biting deep, the population had increased to 85,000 with just 18,003 uniformed staff in post. In HMP Manchester on that fateful Sunday morning in 1990, more uniformed staff were on duty than the entire operational complement of HMP Bedford in 2016, when 200 prisoners rioted, causing £1 million damage.
The rioters of 1990 paraded their grievances from the roof of HMP Strangeways. Paul Taylor, who started the riot by wrestling the microphone from the prison chaplain, began by saying: ‘I would just like to say, right, that this man has just talked about the blessing of the heart and how a hardened heart can be delivered. No, it cannot, not with resentment, anger and bitterness and hatred being instilled in people.’
To some extent the fury that followed had an almost political dimension that arguably influenced the Woolf Report’s far-reaching recommendations and started the prison service on a voyage of rediscovery to a more humane form of incarceration. It was a radical reassessment of the purpose and form of imprisonment, informed by a strong sense that the protesting prisoners, while in no sense condoned for their violence, had snapped under intolerable conditions.
This contrasts vividly with the current scenes of disorder across the prison estate that continue to stifle any real chance that our prison system, as currently constituted, can be an engine of anything beyond physical incapacitation. While the base factors remain the same, overcrowding, understaffing, long hours of ‘bang up’, the addition of extreme levels of violence towards staff, a rampant drugs economy facilitated by illicit mobile phones and a tsunami 19of unmet psychological despair all interact in various malign ways to make disorder a predominantly recreational activity. The scenes of anarchy regularly broadcast via smuggled mobile phones from prisons of all types across the country are a humiliation not just for the state but for victims of crime who, at the very least, want to know that their attackers are being helped, to prevent them from victimising others.
Take for example, HMP Guys Marsh, a medium-sized Category C prison nestled deep in the Dorset countryside. The prison itself, staffed from the adjoining housing estate built for prison officers, had existed in relative obscurity in several guises since it opened in 1960 on the site of a US military hospital. It has been a borstal, a young offender institution and now holds around 550 adults in medium-secure conditions in eight residential units of varying standards of decrepitude. In 2014, an inspection by the then Chief Inspector of Prisons, Nick Hardwick, a man not given to hyperbole, described it as ‘a prison that was in crisis, where managers and staff had all but lost control.’ A rampant drugs economy, overstretched and battered staff, extremely poor physical conditions and the domination of the physical space by gangs largely emanating from Bristol and Gloucester had destroyed any possibility of rehabilitation for many of its luckless inhabitants. At the time, despite Guys Marsh’s designation as a ‘training prison’, what work was available was menial, and only 16 per cent of prisoners were engaged on education and training courses.5
Two years later, the inspectorate visited again. Most of the inspections’ work is based on unannounced inspections to get the most authentic feel for how a prison operates. In the case of Guys Marsh it was given six months’ notice of a follow-up to its disastrous 202014 review. Despite this, the report was still devastating. There had been almost no progress, with many recommendations from the previous inspection ignored. The physical decline in the prison now matched and even accelerated the deterioration in behaviour.
Many communal areas and much of the accommodation remained in a poor condition. Facilities and cells were dirty, furniture was broken or missing and too many cells had missing window panes. Prisoners expressed frustration at their lack of access to basic amenities such as bedding, kit and cleaning materials. The prison, in response, blamed much of the problem upon their maintenance contractor.6
Unlike the brute regimentation and constriction of Strangeways-era rioting, the opposite phenomenon has contributed to contemporary disorder – too much freedom. Prisoners operating in gangs emboldened by too few staff with too little resilience exploited this passivity and, particularly in the case of Category B and C prisons, extended control over communal space. In 2016, prisoners at HMP Swaleside, a relatively new long-term prison on the Isle of Sheppey, rioted, sixty of them temporarily taking over a wing in the prison and forcing staff to withdraw. The independent local watchdog, known as the Independent Monitoring Board (IMB) reported that ‘what is inescapable is an unacceptable escalation of instability in the prison, continuation of assaults by prisoners on both staff and prisoners and the increased use of both drugs and weapons’.7
Even our most allegedly impregnable institutions, the nine high security prisons where the most dangerous prisoners including terrorists are kept, have not escaped the corrosive instability of the past 21few years when staff numbers and experience was at its lowest ebb. In 2017 and just last year, elite prison riot squads – dozens of specially trained and equipped prison staff bussed in from neighbouring establishments – battled to restore control as prisoners took over wings after driving staff out of them under a barrage of missiles.
