Guest Blog 98

Thanks go to the author of the following that came in yesterday, and with one indicated minor typo correction, I've taken the liberty of publishing it as a guest blog piece:- 

I am someone on the other side of the prison divide to the owner of this blog and many of those that comment - that is to say I am a serving prisoner currently in open conditions and working out of the prison (hence my being able to write this).

The open letter of 26th June 2024 from the Prison Governors Association does not tell anyone who has anything at all to do with prisons anything new; that is not to say that it is not a welcome letter (it is) but the information contained within it could have been written 2, 5, 10 or more years ago. 

That the prisons are in crisis is plain for all to see - we are rehabilitating no one and the prison service, and services ancillary to it, have an impossible task. I understand, as a prisoner, that we are the very bottom of the list - no one wants to spend money on us, our conditions or our futures when schools, hospitals, adult care and so on are all, also, in dire need of funds. But at the moment we may as well take the budgets that we have and simply set fire to them - because they provide no value for money whatsoever and perpetuate a system whereby we have record high prisoner numbers and similarly high levels of recidivism and not even an outline of a plan to resolve any of it.

I know, I know - lock us all up for longer, put more of us in each cell and throw away the keys. But once that infantile assessment is shelved, we do actually need to deal with the real problem at hand.

We can at least hope that a new government will look at things differently, but it will need to take very bold steps if it is actually going to make some effective changes. Indeed - one might be worried that in fact things goes the other way given that the prison population swelled by 32,500, to 83,887 as Labour introduced 19 new crime bills when last in government.

Whether the 40% of sentence suggestion takes root or not, it will be little more than a sticking plaster on a problem so significant that nothing other than root and branch change will make any real difference. Whilst my views are unpopular with some of my fellow inmates, and no doubt with the authorities too, I would suggest the following:

1. Make prisoners work for their keep - hours and hours spent locked up are nothing but a drain on the resources of the nation and teach prisoners nothing. There are plenty of jobs that could be done to make the prisons money with a huge labour force - some of which is already well trained.

2. Impose mandatory education - if you leave prison not being able to read you are highly unlikely ever to get a meaningful job.

3. [Make] the majority of C Cats into D Cat-like pod prisons - if you behave then you stay and if you don't you go back into a C Cat and remain there. Allowing prisoners some semblance of normality and privacy will make better, not worse, human beings.

4. Carry out weekly MDTs - drugs are rife and the source of much trouble in the estate. Tackle them properly.

5. Pay prison staff and those ancillary to prisons properly - to attract those who see the role as important and valuable, those individuals need to be rewarded appropriately.

6. Make probation a service more involved inside the estate - so that experienced probation officers can meet individuals before release and have meaningful input into their release plans; at the moment (and this is my experience only) the internal COMs are untrained and under-managed and, suffering from the lack of pay mentioned above, leave the service all too soon.

7. Give shorter sentences - I know; hugely unpopular but locking people up for 15 or 20 years for non-violent offences is a remarkable way to treat people in 2024 and achieves nothing.

8. Scrap sentences of less than 12 months - again they are entirely pointless.

9. Study those European nations with lower prison populations per capita and lower levels of recidivism and base decisions around crime and punishment on data and science and not on political posturing - leaving others to clear up the mess inevitably left behind.

Will any of the above happen? It is unlikely, but as you learn after a while behind the door - we can but hope.