How To Fix Our Prisons

Entitled 'Control, Order, Hope' the Centre for Social Justice has been busy preparing a manifesto for prison safety and reform. There are 59 recommendations, which I do not intend to cover here, but the following gives a flavour of the thinking, puts matters into political context and makes clear that there can be no reduction in the prison population until the probation omnishambles is sorted out.  

Foreword

The discourse on prison reform very often excludes the people who work face-to-face with prisoners in our criminal justice system. Front line prison staff are our greatest asset in the fight to bring safety and opportunity back to a prison system disfigured by years of underinvestment and poor leadership. All too often this vital role is rendered invisible by those who fail to understand or acknowledge the profoundly important duty they carry out.

Our addiction to cheap custody has entrenched the instability and extreme violence that makes it all but impossible for prisons to do the job we pay our taxes for. An obsession with managerialism and pious abstractions has done nothing to make English and Welsh prisons the engines of human transformation they could be. Many other countries manage to model this positive vision, and we should be no different. 

Prisons don’t have to be inherently harmful. Destruction of the spirit, all too common across the system, is not inevitable and it is not unfixable. It simply takes leadership, will and proper resources. Those who actually work in our prisons can do the rest. 

This is a manifesto to get our violently disordered prisons back on their feet again. It deliberately avoids the tired rhetoric of a criminal justice ‘commentariat’ who too often confuse prisoner advocacy with public safety and are sometimes shamefully silent on the security and welfare of the men and women who work our prison landings. 

We have been practical and straightforward about the changes needed now, to make prisons safe places capable of doing more than delaying the offending of the people inside them. It builds on the work already started by Prisons Minister Rory Stewart, one of the most intellectually and morally engaged holders of that post for many years. 

Prisons manage human failure. Our aim is to put forward ideas that will help make custody productive – where confident and skilled staff can assist people in their care to break away from criminality and realise their potential. But without the foundation of security, order and control, no amount of warm words on hope and progress will make a jot of difference. In my experience at all levels of prison management and leadership, where you have well supported staff who feel valued, have dignity, have agency – anything is possible. 

Order and control is emphatically not a recipe for state oppression as our detractors will inevitably suggest. It is in fact, as anyone who has ever walked a prison landing knows, the starting point of a journey to legitimacy and ambition for our citizens in prison. This manifesto, building on previous CSJ work on practical prison reform, describes that journey in detail.

There are big questions to answer about who we send to prison and the price we are willing to pay for it as a society. In the meantime, 82,000 prisoners, most of whom will be released back into the community and 23,000 uniformed staff who want to help keep them there deserve our respect and our help to succeed. 

That key relationship and what it could achieve is at the heart of this work. 

 

Ian Acheson

Former prison Governor who led the landmark 2016 independent government review of violent extremism in prisons.

Executive summary

Our prisons are in a terrible state. This has not come about overnight. For decades our prisons and the public have been let down, just as those working and living in them, have been failed. The most recent failings have been driven by a reduction in the number of prison officers working in our prisons, but longer-term failings have included a defeatist attitude towards tackling drugs and addiction, and a failure to keep the prison estate up-to-date and fit-for-purpose. 

Some of these failings can be pinned at the feet of particular governments, but the reality is that for decades politicians have failed to grasp the importance of ensuring that our prisons are adequately resourced. Our prison leaders need to be supported to and held accountable for creating safe regimes that move people away from crime, with employment and work-readiness too often being seen as an optional extra or else delivered in an ineffective fashion. 

For several years running, the CSJ's Criminal Justice Award has gone to organisations working tirelessly to help prisoners turn their backs on crime with a focus on employment. This year, Tempus Novo, created by two former prison officers, demonstrates what can be achieved, and at the same time, the latest evidence emerging from Norway, points to the power of work and employment to fight crime. But the power of work and employment as a route out of crime is undermined when our prisons are in crisis. 

If there is one resounding message that this 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, ending the violence, and supporting staff. For in prisons awash with drugs, brutality and disempowered prison officers, there can be precious little prospect of offenders turning their lives around. In fact, quite the opposite, with prisoners accelerated into addiction, violence, and worse criminal behaviour. 

Finally, the answer to our prisons crisis is not simply to send fewer people to prison. Our own polling of UK adults found that while some (19 per cent) said the Government should send fewer people to prison to reduce overcrowding and improve staffing levels, the vast majority (70 per cent) said the Government should build more prison spaces and recruit more prison officers to reduce overcrowding and improve staffing levels. 

In the absence of effective community sentences in which the public and sentencers have confidence, and at a time when probation services are failing, we should not be surprised by this result and nor should we dismiss it.

But it is about more than resources, for the fundamental solution is to restore control, order, and hope to our jails – and to accompany this with a plan of action that delivers meaningful and, where appropriate, new intensive community sentences that help change behaviour, deliver punishment, and cut crime. 

This paper focuses on how we can restore control, order, and hope to our prisons. We outline a total of 59 recommendations, but prioritise the following for consideration by this and future governments with a determination to ensure that our prison, and wider criminal justice system, works for victims, the public, and those who work in it, by keeping them safe and helping reduce, rather than generate crime.

Conclusion

The need to restore control, order, and hope in our prisons has never been greater. 

Since 2015 it is clear that Government has sought to reverse some of the poor decisions that placed prisoners and staff alike in intolerable and unacceptable conditions. The last four Justice Secretaries have all tried to repair the damage. Michael Gove’s radical reforms were supplanted by Liz Truss’s focus on getting additional staff back on our dangerous prison landings. David Lidington’s decent efforts to beef up the powers of the prisons inspectorate, have been replaced by David Gauke and Rory Stewart’s welcome focus on the basics of order, control and decency. 

The ideas contained in this manifesto, big and small, are supportive of restoring discipline and purpose in our disordered jails. The families of prison officers and prisoners alike have every right to expect that their loved ones are safe while inside custody and return to them no worse than they entered. Society pays the price for the failure of the prison system – broken staff, broken lives, lost potential. 

Citizens have every right to expect that scarce resources are properly spent breaking the cycle of offending and reoffending that destroys lives and communities and creates further victims. It means ensuring that our prisons are model societies, not simply warehouses run by those who carry on their criminal lifestyles through violence and intimidation. Our prisons can and must be much more than a Hobbesian state of nature. 

The failure of any state – least of all a modern democratic one – to act decisively in this situation is an affront to morality and an indictment of basic competence. For many who end up in our prisons – and for the victims beyond the prison wall – the state has already let them down, whether through failing to protect rights to life or property, or through the failure to tackle the social breakdown that sits behind so much of the crime in Britain today. 

Nobody with a commitment to social justice, tackling poverty, or protecting the vulnerable should seek to oppose the restoration of control, order, and hope in our prisons. 

Nor should anyone with such a commitment support artificial and unsustainable reductions in the prison population. Calls to ease the pressure on our prisons by reducing overcrowding and improving staffing levels through such reductions in the prison population are not popular, with 70 per cent of the public preferring to build more prison spaces and recruit more prison staff.

At the same time, scrapping short prison sentences, while popular with 70 per cent of MPs in Westminster, is less so with the public. Our polling found that while 17 per cent support the Government reducing the use of short prison sentences “immediately”, more than half (53 per cent) said “only when it has the new more effective community sentences in place”, and almost 1 in 4 (23 per cent) said “never”. 

The challenge ahead, and upon which the Prisons Minister has embarked, is significant. To truly restore control, order, and hope will require a long-term sustained plan across our prisons – but also that builds genuine public and sentencer confidence in new and more effective community sentences. 

The absence of control, order, and hope is the presence of despair. We must make prisons places of transformation and this relies first and foremost on them being safe for all inside on either side of the bars. Ministers must seize the moment to empower the new Prison Service Chief Executive with the tools and support to get control back, restore order, and then create hope and purpose. 

Ministers must arm this new leader with the tools and expect the visible leadership that is so desperately needed to reverse the tragic and avoidable disintegration of a once proud organisation. Brutality, despair and violence in prisons is not inevitable. It is not unfixable. Our manifesto is a bold call to arms in aid of a public service and public servants desperate for change. We must act now. Lives depend on it.