Our jails are broken – tear down the bars

The PM is right to focus on the appalling state of prisons, but his reforms need to be even bolder

PRISONS that release the most criminals who reoffend should be named and shamed in new league tables, the Prime Minister will pledge today as he criticises the “scandalous failure” of Britain’s jail system.

The new data drive would lead to tables being published that measure each institution’s reoffending levels as well as tracking how well a criminal is improving at reading and other basic skills.

David Cameron also wants to create six “reform prisons”, the governors of which would be given more freedom to implement reforms and control spending, in an echo of his free schools drive.

The proposals come as Mr Cameron pledges to make a “truly 21st-century” prisons system in his latest modernising speech since the election.

No10 is billing the speech as the first by a prime minister on the topic of prisons for more than two decades.

Mr Cameron is expected to say the “scandalous” failure of prisons to rehabilitate criminals – 60 per cent of short-sentence prisoners will reoffend within a year of release – harms society.

He will say: “This failure really matters. It matters to the public purse: this cycle of reoffending costs up to £13 bil- lion a year. It matters to you: because in the end, who are the victims of this reoffending? It’s the mother who gets burgled or the young boy who gets mugged.

“It matters to the prison staff – some of the most deeply committed public servants in our country – who have to work in dangerous and intimidating conditions. And yes, it matters to the prisoners themselves, who mustn’t feel like society has totally given up on them.”

The Prime Minister is expected to say that he is not “starry-eyed” about what prisons can achieve and believes punishment is “not a dirty word”.

However, he will add: “In short: we need a prison system that doesn’t see prisoners as simply liabilities to be managed, but instead as potential assets to be harnessed.” Jails to be shamed to stop reoffending

This morning, David Cameron will deliver the first speech by a prime minister exclusively devoted to prisons. It’s a bold move, and about time. Ten years ago Mr Cameron used to go jogging around HMP Wormwood Scrubs in west London. Even then it was a grim place, and no doubt he suffered the shouted abuse and obscene suggestions from cell windows; but if he visited today he would be appalled.

You can tell the state of a prison from the rubbish. If prisoners are locked up for too many hours a day; if they don’t respect their guards or fellow inmates; if they don’t get training, mental health support and all the other things they lack, they express their distress the only way they can: by trashing the place.

At Wormwood Scrubs the rubbish lies ankle deep under the cell windows. All the detritus of these cramped lives – the plastic wrappers and toilet rolls, the parcels of excrement – litters the grass.

Yet this is holy ground. Wormwood Scrubs was built on church land in the 1870s, an imposing, austerely beautiful edifice of social reform. The lease stipulated that the first building erected should be a chapel, and that no executions should ever be carried out in the prison.

For all its moral beginnings, the Scrubs is a squalid pile. There has never been an execution, but people die here with sad regularity by their own hand. I have been visiting it for 10 years, but those with longer memories say this is the worst they’ve ever known it.

So what is wrong with Wormwood Scrubs, and with the rest of a prison system that collectively sees two thirds of released prisoners back inside within two years?

Three things need addressing. First, the design. Those Victorians thought that prisoners should be kept away from each other to reflect on their sin in solitude. And so they neglected the need for classrooms, for sports, for all the positive socialisation that good design enables. The best prisons around the world are built and run more like boarding schools than batteries of chicken coops.

Second, the staffing. Prisons suffer from a combination of people problems. Deep cuts to staff – down a third since 2010 while the number of inmates has remained constant – has put huge pressure on an overcrowded system. Add to this a prison workers’ union that sees the peace, quiet and remuneration of its members as synonymous with the purpose of the prison, and you have a workforce that obstructs every attempt to flex the system in favour of rehabilitation.

Last, and worst, is politics. For 20 years the system has been steadily centralised, to the point that governors cannot fix budgets or deploy staff without the say-so of Whitehall. Meanwhile, in the last parliament, prisoner resettlement and probation was outsourced in vast regional contracts to megacorp PLCs (a US firm with zero experience of British justice is in charge of resettling almost all the convicted offenders in London). The result is even more confusion of accountability.

It’s little wonder the last governor of Wormwood Scrubs – who resigned shortly after Whitehall backed the union branch over him – said to me, “I don’t run this jail”. The new senior team is making big efforts to turn the place around, but they have their work cut out.

But if the points the Prime Minister makes today come to fruition, all this is about to change. He will announce positive reforms: to rebuild Victorian jails and give governors more autonomy; to recruit a new breed of talented staff; to use technology rather than bars to manage security; and to allow independent providers – hopefully charities, rather than shareholder-owned giants in pursuit of profit – to run jails.

The programme is consciously inspired by Michael Gove’s time at the Department of Education, when he made a similar fetish of headteacher independence. Everyone should hope that, as Justice Secretary, he achieves a comparable revolution in standards. But there are deeper reforms that need to come next.

Prisons are, or should be, local institutions, part of the community they serve. They should be directed not by Whitehall but by voters, in the form of city mayors or police and crime commissioners, who would surely find that socialisation, training and mental healthcare are better for everyone – law-abiding taxpayers most of all – than squalor and idleness.

Wormwood Scrubs was built with prison labour to a design by Edmund Du Cane, the administrator who took over local jails in the name of the Crown and created the national prison system. It is Mr Gove’s job to unpick Du Cane’s legacy. He should signal his intention by announcing the demolition of the Scrubs, and the creation of a new prison with a new design, autonomous management, and accountable to the Mayor of London. Only then might the rubbish levels fall.