Our prisons are now rotten with violence

HMP Birmingham’s crisis reflects a system in which officers have become fearful turn keys

The Chief Inspector of Prisons, Peter Clarke, is nobody’s idea of an insurgent. After a distinguished career in the Metropolitan Police, he assumed his current post with many in the criminal justice commentariat grumbling that the Government had bagged itself a “yes man”. Few will be labouring under that delusion now.

Clarke’s effectiveness as the canary in the dark mine of our prison crisis is underlined by the honesty and outrage that leaps off the pages of inspection report after report. These culminated in his devastating findings on privately run HMP Birmingham – an institution so rotten with violence, squalor, drug use and official complacency that he has demanded an action plan from the Justice Secretary within 28 days. This is an institution, Clarke said yesterday, pervaded by “filth, the air hanging heavy with the smell of drugs, a sense of great instability, a feeling that at any time violence could break out”. Imagine this was a hospital, or a school. Heads would inevitably roll.

But the same rules don’t seem to apply to our feral penal establishments – in public and private hands. Extreme violence has become normalised, and misbehaviour punished less harshly inside than outside prison. When I was a prison officer, we felt confident about keeping order. Now staff have become fearful turn keys, retreating to “places of safety”. This sense of loss of control is amplified in prisons such as Birmingham. An embedded state official (the Controller) supposedly sits in judgment on the private contractor’s performance with powers to penalise poor delivery. It is clear the people actually in charge were the criminals.

Broken institutions and staff won’t produce people fit to rejoin society. Places like Birmingham have merely become camps that delay future offending and in some cases accelerate it. The marketisation of prison custody had laudable aims. It was supposedly a win-win for pushing up quality by competition and pushing down costs. It has delivered to an extent, but when cheap commercial custody became an excuse for state prison staff cuts, the writing was on the wall.

As Clarke and prisons minister Rory Stewart have both said, however, while resources are key, leadership from the top is essential. Governors who can inspire front-line staff and are in turn supported by competent management in Whitehall are critical to success. Instead, fatuous managerialism has been allowed to take over. Despite a truly heroic decline in almost every metric of decency, humanity and safety across many prisons, not one official either running an institution or overseeing it on behalf of the state has been held to account. The Prison Service hierarchy needs dramatic and urgent reform. People on either side of the cell doors are literally dying for change.

You cannot have rehabilitation without control. You cannot have control without suitable and sufficient numbers of staff firmly in charge. Stewart has identified a hit list of 10 of our worst prisons to improve in 12 months, as I argued for in an open letter to his boss in January. This will be a litmus test for whether decisive action will be taken to reverse rising violence – a precursor to restoring purposeful regimes attracting prisoners away from drugs and despair.

Prison staff need to have their dignity at work restored to boost morale. There is still little sign that either the police, CPS or judiciary take assaults on staff seriously, resulting in derisory fines and concurrent sentences for humiliating attacks. Exemplary and consecutive sentences would send a clear signal that violence against the state’s servants will be met with the full force of the law.

Bad management also needs to be rooted out, and the divide between managers and front-line staff closed. One of the clearest ways Stewart could signal the primacy of front-line officers is to place all prison personnel in uniform, even those in Whitehall, to revive an esprit de corps. It’s time to put the suits back on the landings.

Birmingham is the latest poster boy for wholesale organisational failure in the prison system. It probably won’t be the last. If ministers are serious about rescuing jailed and jailers from a vortex of brutality and despair – and I think they are – they need to turn their attention on those who have presided over this decline.