Professor Ian Acheson is Senior Advisor to the Counter Extremism Project. His new book ‘Screwed: Britain’s Prison Crisis and How To Escape It‘ is available now.
The high-security prison system – the specialist jails where hundreds of the worst offenders in the system such as predatory rapists, child murderers, organised crime bosses, and terrorists end up – is in trouble.
Out of more than a hundred jails, there are six main establishments. They are not overcrowded. Most have modern facilities. All have considerably more staff and security infrastructure than lower-security prisons. They hold all of our national security risk, and are designed around the principle that the people held within those walls are so dangerous escape must be made impossible.
To be fair, we haven’t had an escape from inside a Category A prison for years. But far less attention is consequently paid to what happens inside them, and the impact this has on those tasked to manage people who often have nothing to lose.
The signs are extremely worrying. Last year Charlie Taylor, the Chief Inspector of Prisons, slated two: HMP Whitemoor and HMP Long Lartin.
At Whitemoor, he did not mince his words. Mince was rotting all over the floor, the prison wings were “the dirtiest I have seen since I became Chief Inspector”, serveries and prison kitchens were “filthy.” He made the point that there’s no better indicator for prisons in decline that the state of its hygiene. At Long Lartin there was similar squalor.
In both places, governors struggled to recruit and retain good staff. Bluntly put: if staff in these places can’t get the bins emptied with a literally captive workforce, what else is going wrong?
A few weeks ago, an officer at HMP Whitemoor was so badly assaulted at work that he was put on a ventilator. Thankfully, he is now recovering. But there was almost no coverage of this horrifying assault in the national media.
If prison staff are made to feel that a condition of their employment is to be assaulted on duty, then they will vote with their feet. There are plenty of more competitive and less stressful jobs out there.
All of these maladies and more also afflict HMP Bedford. Bedford hit the news headlines after an undercover Times reporter revealed security so lax that he, as an unvetted operational support grade in uniform, could walk in off the streets to the prison landings without being searched.
Bedford has been in “special measures” for years. It’s a small inner-city jail next to the M1 corridor where there are many alternatives to what used to be a vocational job for life. Acute staff shortages there meant a constant churn of hastily- and badly-trained recruits thrown into the maw of one of the most violent prisons in the system – and leaving almost as fast as they could be recruited.
Again though, this is not simply a function of poor resources. HMPPS Headquarters, awash with over 5,000 non-operational staff doing God knows what, had spent years trying fruitlessly to embed any positive changes. It has been under management improvement since a riot in 2016 caused almost £1m of damage.
When it rains at Bedford today, the prison’s segregation unit is inundated with raw sewage. A problem that has been going on for years in plain sight. Imagine working or being held in such fixable degradation. But there’s always an excuse and, crucially, never any senior level accountability.
If the security nightmare revealed at HMP Bedford was replicated in almost any other law enforcement agency, you would expect at the very least for the chief executive to make themselves available to the media to be held publicly accountable and explain what action was being taken.
Not so in the invisible service. At His Majesty’s Prison and Probation Service, ministers and the rest of us are given the mushroom treatment. Scandal after scandal has engulfed it, from chaotic, dysfunctional child prisons, to terror suspect escapes from remand, to lethal mistakes by overwhelmed probation staff. There is absolute silence, every time.
Even when parliamentarians manage to hold senior mandarins to account, the result is barely-concealed gibberish. For example, at a recent outing to the Justice Select Committee the latest apex invisibility, Chief Executive Amy Rees, was asked what she was doing about removing single-use razors from prisoners.
These have been used to appalling effect against inmates and staff when fashioned into lethal improvised weapons. Despite seven pilot projects, and years after the alarm was raised by unions, we were treated to more specious guff about evaluations – and no closer to knowing if or when this risk would be eliminated.
And the risk is real. In February this year, a prison officer was assaulted by one of these weapons, the blades melted into the shaft, and received 53 stitches to his face. That is to say nothing about the lives than may have been lost by prisoners self-harming using these blades.
HMPPS HQ has more pilots than Easyjet – the default refuge of an incompetent bureaucracy. All in the air, nothing landed. Years after Rory Stewart agreed to the issue of PAVA spray for front line officers, this still hasn’t been properly rolled out, hitched as it is to training completely unrelated to officer safety.
It’s absolutely no wonder that front line prison staff, the potential engine room of rehabilitation, feel abandoned by senior management, who seem to often regard the front line as a necessary burden rather than a valuable, indeed vital, resource.
I don’t know whether the voters, either in Cheltenham or nationally, will allow Alex Chalk to continue to hold this poisoned chalice. What is undeniable is that over 14 years of government by a party I voted for (and am a member of), the prison service has been destroyed by wonkery, wokery, and criminally stupid austerity cuts.
If he is after a legacy, beyond being forced to let violent prisoners out early because there’s no room, the Justice Secretary should think carefully about initiating a fundamental external review of the structure, purpose and capability of the senior management of HMPPS. For the prison system, much like governments in terminal decline, the fish rots from the head.
The post Ian Acheson: Britain’s high-security prison system is rotting from the head. Chalk must take the fight to the mandarins. appeared first on Conservative Home.
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Author: Ian Acheson
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