Nigel Farage has announced that Reform UK would, if they form a government, construct 15 so-called Nightingale prisons to solve the cell shortage. These would be low-cost, prefabricated facilities built on military sites (the Army would apparently be drafted in to help with construction) intended to house up to 12,400 prisoners.
The Government has denounced these plans as ‘unfunded and undeliverable’, which is a rather bleak commentary on the state of the country. One could come up with all sorts of objections to the idea of pre-fab prisons, but the idea that the British state couldn’t even build them is too abject for words.
But let’s assume for the moment that they could be built; let us too ignore the tedious pedants crying out that Florence Nightingale was a nurse, not a jailer; words outgrow their original contexts, and ‘Nightingale’ in the parlance of the modern British state means ‘temporary’. Are they actually a good idea?
In fairness, they probably are. But it is quite a fine balance, and depends a lot on both the specifics of the plans and on whether or not they proved, in the long run, to be actually temporary.
We should never underestimate that second problem. In the post-war era, the British state has been both cash-strapped and increasingly loath to build anything; at the same time, we have developed a reverential, museum-keeper’s mindset towards our built environment. As a result, we are today living with the consequences of cheap post-war housing, intended by those who commissioned it to be temporary, still being in use decades after its intended lifespan.
It is not difficult, therefore, to imagine our opening these Nightingale prisons and never closing them, and that ministers in 30 or 40 years’ time will be challenged over the appalling conditions in rotting prefabs. When this happened with regard to schools, it did spur ministers to make heavy investments in new buildings – but prisoners are a much less sympathetic population than children, and have less effective lobbyists than teachers.
Assuming that the Nightingale prisons could be delivered for reasonable cost, and that a proper prison-building programme was also delivered on the same basis, the next question is who staffs them.
Ian Acheson, a former prison governor, argued in his excellent book ‘Screwed’ that one of the most important causes of the current prison crisis is a recruitment and retention crisis. Poorly trained, insecure and inexperienced staff simply cannot run prisons well; everything from detecting contraband and combating gang violence to administering effective education and anti-recidivism programmes requires experienced personnel.
The original crisis was precipitated by George Osborne’s untargeted and directionless austerity agenda; in order to cut costs, the Ministry of Justice paid a huge tranche of our most experienced prison officers to take early retirement. When this resulted in a quite predictable collapse in prison performance, it hurriedly reversed course – but recruiting new staff into overstretched institutions, and with too few old hands to learn from, hasn’t worked.
So one question Reform will have to answer is: who will staff these prisons? One suspects Farage might simply say ‘the Army’ again, especially if the sites are all on Ministry of Defence land. But none of the organisations that operate on such sites (the Army, the Royal Military Police, the MoD Police, etc.) have the experience of being prison officers, so that simply turns an MoJ recruitment challenge into an MoD one.
Yet the biggest potential objection to Nightingale prisons is actually rather more prosaic: are they the only, let alone the best, way to rapidly expand prison capacity? Could we not, perhaps, simply re-open a bunch of prisons which the Conservatives only recently shut?
Between 2010 and 2024, the Tories closed the following 17 prisons: Ashwell, Lancaster Castle, and Latchmere House in 2011; Bullwood Hall, Camp Hill, Canterbury, Kingston, Northallerton, Shrewsbury and Shepton Mallet in 2013; Blundeston, Dorchester, Gloucester and Reading in 2014, and Blantyre House, Holloway and Kennet in 2016. (It also closed Glen Parva and Wellingborough, but opened new prisons on the same sites.)
That’s a lot of prisons, which is why net prison capacity increased by only 482 places over the 14 years the Conservatives were in office. Many, especially the tranche shuttered in 2013, were closed for ‘economic reasons’, which looks very stupid now given how expensive building a new one is.
HMP Lancaster is an especially egregious case: as recounted in his autobiography, ‘Kind of Blue’, Ken Clarke wanted to close it in the 1990s but didn’t manage it; upon returning to government in 2010 as Justice Secretary, he made a point of finishing the job, despite the fact that Lancaster had been only recently renovated and was one of the best-performing prisons in the country.
So far, so sad. But there is a potential silver lining: several of these sites have not been redeveloped. No fewer than four – Gloucester, Lancaster Castle, Shepton Mallet and Shrewsbury – are currently serving as tourist attractions, as prisons; in April, the former HMP Shrewsbury played host to a rave starring the DJ Judge Jules.
Between them, these four sites had, before closure, a combined official capacity of over 1,000. They are still fitted out as prisons, because at present their business model is being fake prisons for tourists. If the goal is expanding prison capacity quickly, compulsory purchase of these sites (and there may be other suitable ones that I’ve missed) would surely be the quickest way to go about it.
These would obviously not come close to delivering the 12,000 or more places Farage wants, and there would still be the staffing problem. But on the other side of the ledger, with a little renovation, they need not be so urgently temporary as prefabricated prisons dumped on military land; indeed some, especially Lancaster, could simply be permanently re-opened as part of the proper prison estate.
Is this an ideal solution? Obviously not. There are good reasons why the Ministry of Justice has tried to decommission the old Victorian prisons, not all of them economic. But it is foolish to compare Victorian prisons to imaginary modern prisons when we haven’t built them; the question is whether a site such as Shepton Mallet or Gloucester is better than no prison at all.
Doubtless the prison reform lobby would say no. But unless we’re about to radically reduce the number of people we send to jail – and we’re not – then the electorate’s answer is almost certainly a resounding ‘Yes!’.
Whenever I think about Boris Johnson, the old French proverb ‘après moi le déluge’ comes to mind. It means a blithe, even nihilistic disregard for whatever ruination ensues after one’s own time. For many years, it was thought to have originated with Louis XV or his mistress Madame de Pompadour in the 1750s. It thus […]
At a few minutes past six on Friday morning, in a leisure centre on the Essex coast, the returning officer reached the bottom of a ballot paper roughly a metre long and announced a number that deserves more attention than it is likely to receive. Nigel Farage, 22,239 votes. The commentary had settled into its […]
The problem for bright-eyed and bushy-tailed new prime ministers who take over part-way through a Parliament is they start with a king-sized chip on their shoulders. They walk through Downing Street’s door knowing they aren’t the one who won the election mandate they’re inheriting, and needing to defuse whichever political crisis overwhelmed their predecessor too. […]
