During my thirty years working for penal justice I visited around 100 prisons in the UK and many more across every continent. I never found a place that I would be content to reside in, which must be the test for prisons. They are not intended to be places that inflict punishment as that is meant to be the deprivation of liberty, the most severe penalty. Yet once again a news paper has revealed the dire state of prisons in this country.
The Observer journalists did something that I used to do as a matter of course and indeed used to publicise, they reviewed the reports of inspections and found that three quarters of prisons in England were judged to be unsafe. If they had looked at monitoring reports by the watchdogs who go into prisons every day, as opposed to inspectors who visit once every few years, they would have found the same thing.
Dangerously unsafe prisons matter because they fester with violence, drugs and incivility. Prisons are part of our community and what happens inside seeps out into the wider community when people released from months or years in prison commit more crimes and often more violent crimes. It seeps out when staff are dehumanised by the violence and cruelty that see and that they have to inflict through the capricious disciplinary system that imposes solitary confinement and other punishments in response to unrest, resistance and frustration.
Governments for decades have used the dual mantra of increasing punishment inside prisons and increasing the number of prisons as a populist policy. They know this does not work to make prisons safer and by building more prisons they simply augment the problem, they don’t solve it. It’s the cheapest and nastiest expression of political leadership.
Like motorways or hospitals, the problem of over-use and crowding in prisons will not be solved by trying to build our way out of the chaos. Road traffic has to be curtailed and managed, healthcare has to take place in the community as far as possible, and sanctions for crime have to be based in prevention and the community.
It is disappointing that once again Labour and Conservatives are locked in this dead end competition. The public, and particularly victims of crime, deserve better. If government and opposition are not presenting a different vision, it is welcome that the some of the media are trying to create a different narrative.