I have a particular interest in the recent Channel Four documentary series Prison, which has laid bare the appalling state of our penal system. In the mid-90s I was a newly minted Principal Officer — then the most senior uniformed rank — at HMP Durham where the current episodes were shot. While the stage was familiar, the plot was sadly lost.
Prison showed — with admirable candour — that the state was no longer in control at HMP Durham. On the wings, the insatiable desire for drugs, endemic mental illness, self-harm and violence had all combined to overwhelm the few brave staff on duty. How could any seeds of rehabilitation germinate in this plague dirt of squalor, despair, indolence and brutality?
The fact the benighted HMP Durham doesn’t even feature in prison minister Rory Stewart’s just-published hit list of prisons to improve tells you everything about the state of the system he took responsibility for in January this year. It also puts into perspective how bad things must be at HMP Birmingham, which has just been brought under government control as an emergency measure.
Stewart has an admirable background in both thinking and doing — an increasingly rare combination in the upper echelons of Government. He has touched the sides of life in ways more various and useful than your less-than-average think tanker with a red box. In an open letter to his boss, David Gauke, on this website after their joint appointment to the Justice brief I wrote:
“By the way, given his diplomatic experience in conflict zones, Mr Stewart will know a bullshitter when he sees one, which can only be good news when he meets the people who are running the wreckage of our prison and probation system.”
He is also a man in a fantastic bind. The dogs in the street know that the current endemic problems across the prison system stem from a criminally stupid culling of prison staff off the front line mandated by Treasury cuts after 2010.
A braver and more intelligent government with better officials advising them might have opted for a very uncomfortable discussion with the public. It would have told them that we just can’t afford to lock up as many people as this, that it’s in any case an expensive way of making bad people worse, and that it’s time for a radical change.
But, of course, that didn’t happen. We simply became addicted to the idea of cheap custody and the rest is Rory Stewart’s in-tray.
If you can’t have fewer prisoners, more staff might be the answer. Again, Stewart has little room for manoeuvre. The much vaunted emergency increase of staff brokered by one of Secretary Gauke’s serial predecessors (with no sign of any humility) to try to repair the damage of earlier cuts has put over 2,500 new sets of boots on the prison landings many of whom are promptly leaving when the happy-clappy rhetoric of their training meets the brute reality of life on the landings. There’s a hole in your bucket, dear Rory.
Faced with this reality, many of Stewart’s less illustrious incumbents did nothing more than spout increasingly vapid press office soundbites. Taking arms against the chaos was just too difficult when your opponents are in the boardroom as well as the cells.
The criminal justice blob squatting at the heart of the Ministry of Justice has two main weapons in its bureaucratic armoury: it can outlast any minister and — crucially — it mediates the message from the front line to manage its own reputation.
Normally, this is enough to silence a politician with the temerity to ask questions or, god forbid, suggest radical changes. Yet the signs are with Rory Stewart that the mandarins have a fight on their hands.
Here is a minister who has actual experience of insurgency — by sword as well as pen. Here is someone who has governed an unruly province in Iraq who will understand the heartfelt desire of prison Governors to be released from the dead hand of bureaucracy. Here is a man who gets out and about into prisons and insists on throwing managers out of his meetings with staff there to get a true picture of the daily challenges that confront them.
What he sees is a system which has far too much routine violence and disorder to function effectively in any other way. He also sees places beset by the same challenges which are operating very differently in terms of the basics.
The fact that HMP Liverpool was a cockroach infested penal dustbin when inspected while another prison down the road was clean can’t simply be explained by resources. It is also a matter or leadership, will and accountability. Far, far too often these issues have been obscured by a criminal justice commentariat which has for years ignored mere operational issues and focused on lofty ideological abstractions about the purpose of imprisonment and sentencing policy. Tidy landings were beneath them. Not so, minister Stewart.
Mr Stewart isn’t into abstractions. He senses that a clean, decent and ordered prison environment is a pre-requisite for anything more hopeful. He understands the crucial importance of well led staff being in control.
This is why he’s left the sylvan heights of penal reform and is in the weeds looking for answers. How well are prisons led? Are prison staff trained properly for their tasks? Why do some prisons have technology to scan for drugs and block mobile phones which aren’t being used? Where is the accountability and, god help us, action when those paid well to monitor prison performance up the chain of command are being repeatedly warned by the prisons inspectorate things are going awry?
And he’s put his money where his mouth is. Last week, announcing £10 million extra to rescue the ten worst performing prisons across the system from a spiral of drug-induced violence, he has clearly stated that he will resign if those prisons aren’t measurably safer after 12 months. His focus, rightly, will be violence. Record levels of assaults against staff have been normalised with mere hand-wringing to date from those who ought to be working night and day to bring it down. You can’t fix broken people with broken staff.
This is music to the ears of people like me who have been campaigning for such a robust and clear-eyed approach for some years now. Back in January on this website I urged his boss Mr Gauke to: “Take immediate steps to restore order to the ten most challenging establishments in England and Wales. Without order, safety and control for staff and prisoners, prisoners, no progress is possible. Nothing. It’s all just words. Establish an externally supported task force accountable directly to you to take back control of the ungoverned spaces which proliferate across the system.”
I’m glad we are finally being listened to. I’m extremely glad someone of Stewart’s calibre is in place and in power to hear that message repeated from his ragged front line officers. He deserves our thanks and support in the difficult months ahead. And he needs to deliver.
