Observations Of a Prisoner

We don't often get contributions from the other side of the criminal justice system and unfortunately the following was caught in the spam filter the other day:- 

I am an offender who was part-way through a bulky prison sentence when Chris Grayling was let loose upon the CJS. The changes he made to the daily prison regime had a serious impact which seemed to happen overnight. The new ‘core day’ (described as “Our New Way” in all the relevant literature in the prison I was in at the time) essentially took staff away from prison wings. In larger wings, security was monitored via CCTV, and officers were rarely seen. Staff contact became dependent on the application system. Staff cutbacks led to more ‘lock down’ periods, when insufficient staffing levels led to certain activities which many inmates deem important to their routine (gym, library, even religious services occasionally) were curtailed. 

Everybody knows it’s failing, but I can attest to the slump in mood, amongst prisoners and staff alike, was immediate. I met some prison staff who are consummately professional, polite, respectful and approachable, and these people have my sympathy when having to work under these conditions – the officer who wrote the above post could well have been one of these people. I must however add that for each officer with this attitude, there was an officer who was the polar opposite. Not all acts of violence upon staff are unprovoked, and an act of violence against staff is usually returned tenfold in the segregation unit, but that’s another discussion entirely.

It’s a source of irritation to me how the media, when focusing on the very real crisis that the UK prison system finds itself in, pays the highest attention to the wrong detail. Had I not had the experience of prison to refer to I too would assume that these places were hotbeds of violent psychopaths running around high on spice, or whatever. Drugs, and violence, have always been present in UK prisons. Yet post-Grayling I’ve been in a prison where I couldn’t get toilet roll and was advised by staff to use a newspaper to wipe my arse on. In a local Victorian prison I wore the same trousers for six weeks because there wasn’t any spare kit or functioning laundry facility. 

Healthcare access is way below the standard people imagine it to be, HMP Healthcare would be worth an article in itself. OMU backlogs are a source of serious frustration to ISPs and determinate prisoners alike. The complaints system is utterly broken and Legal Aid has been removed. The IMB is well-meaning but toothless. The excellent Nick Hardwick was routinely ignored and summarily dismissed. The IEP system has been dismantled, completely removing any incentive for good behaviour and prisoner co-operation and compliance, the punitive Entry level is particularly pernicious and penalises those who are on remand, and therefore innocent in the eyes of the law. 

When Grayling pushed through all of these insane measures the media ignored the impact of removing Legal Aid to prisoners and instead focused entirely on the book ban, a policy which actually had zero material impact on most prisoners and staff but offended the liberal sensibilities of many writers-in-residence who were able to articulate an argument against it. In reality, the prison system as a whole was poisoned in 2012 and it’s taken a rising number of assaults on staff to draw public attention to the fact that prisons are not places of therapeutic growth, but are increasingly becoming hate factories. It isn’t just staff, or even inmates, who are being failed, but communities and therefore the wider society are not being served by a system that isn’t fit for purpose at present. 

So long as media headlines only speak of a rise in legal highs and statistics regarding assaults on staff, thus suggesting the only real problems within UK prisons are ones of good order and discipline, the prison system will continue to fail those within it, as it has been since 2012.