How long will it be before a prison officer is murdered?

IT WILL not be long now before a prison officer is killed on duty in a British jail. There will be a lot of shock and feigned horror on the part of politicians. And then it will happen again. And then we will get used to it. The great pretence, that our society has crime and disorder under control, cannot continue much longer. It could only really last when the public had not seen in detail what goes on in our prisons.

But in last week’s BBC Panorama programme, brave reporter Joe Fenton took a job as an officer and filmed the reality of a Northumberland prison. This is not some especially bad place. I suspect it is pretty typical.

Anyone who saw it now knows that the comforting fantasy of TV’s Porridge is now nothing but nostalgia. Disorder, drug-taking and danger were constantly present. Basic security was breached. Drugs and other contraband were easily smuggled in. Attempts to prevent this were met with dangerous attacks on officers by outside criminals. Prisoners openly threatened staff, and got away with it.

The smoke from illegal drugs was so dense on some corridors that one officer was overpowered by it and was taken, unconscious and twitching, to hospital.

Officers did not dare enforce the rules or assert themselves, because they knew that they were perilously outnumbered and would be overpowered – and perhaps worse – if they did.

Meanwhile, attempts to ‘educate’ the prisoners were pathetic beyond belief. Some inmates were shown colouring in Peppa Pig cartoons. I have visited prisons in several parts of the world, including Russia, the USA and South Africa. All had their faults and problems, and all made the heart sink. But in two visits to British prisons, including a day spent in Wormwood Scrubs, I long ago detected an undercurrent of menace, only kept from bursting into full life by the presence of experienced and resolute staff.

At that time, the officers were still more or less in control, at least by day. I do not think that they are now. Prisoners are obviously inside so that they can be punished – but punished lawfully and by authority, not by other criminals.

In these places of menace and despair, the suicide rate is flying upwards – 119 since last year, and a total of 1,864 since 1992. This is far greater than the number of executions we used to have (seldom more than 15 a year), but Left-wing liberals, in practice, accept it. They secretly know it is the price of their policies.

Last year there was a 40 per cent rise in assaults on staff and a 28 per cent increase in prisoner-onprisoner assaults, plus a 23 per cent increase in incidents of self-harm, to a total of 37,784.

Many experienced staff have either given up or been made redundant. New recruits are carrying out grave responsibilities within a few weeks of starting work.

I do not know how closely this is connected with the privatisation of prisons. I will come to that. But when the absurd ‘Justice Secretary’, Liz Truss, said last week ‘I want to transform our prisons from places of violence and despair to places of self-improvement and hope where all prisoners are given the chance to lead a better life’, I could hear the low hum of pigs flying overhead in tight formation.

As I was considering this, word reached me that at Forest Bank Prison in Salford (like Northumberland it is run by the private contractor Sodexo), inmates were being given a leaflet explaining to them how to take drugs ‘safely’ (as if it was ever safe).

While it says the best way to avoid danger is not to take these things at all, it then more or less accepts that they will. ‘If you snort,’ it says, ‘chop powders finely first. Don’t inject but if you do, don’t share works (needles) with other people.’

SODEXO, which as far as I can discover is a French food-services company which has gone into the custody business (why not give the job to a chain of bookies, or a payday loan company, or a supermarket giant?), issued the following pathetic statement, which made me yearn for the lost days of nationalisation.

‘We have security policies in place and our staff work really hard to keep drugs out. However, the reality is drugs are an issue in prisons and we have a duty of care to our prisoners. Therefore, we provide advice and support to reduce levels of harm in the prison.’

But what of Ms Truss’s ‘Justice’ Ministry with its soppy dreams of ‘self-improvement and hope’?

When I called them, they immediately tried to pass the buck to Sodexo, as if by privatising the prison they had shrugged off all responsibility for it. Eventually, they emitted this feeble, untrue statement: ‘We have a zero tolerance approach to drugs in our prisons and those who are caught in possession of them can expect to spend longer behind bars.’

This is the end of all their weakness – the absent, uninterested police, the millions of crimes and disorderly actions ignored, unrecorded and unpunished, the useless cautions, the non-existent ‘war on drugs’, the tagging and the feeble fake sentences, the unpaid fines and flabby ‘community service’.

All these years of soppy failure and buck-passing finally drain into the hideous, blocked sump of our useless, miserable prisons, where they will, one day soon, explode in all our faces.

NOW more than ever I am sure that Donald Trump will walk out of the White House (blaming someone else) long before his term is up. He’ll just call a press conference and go. I don’t believe he ever wanted or expected to win, and I think he is utterly bemused by the job. One of his forerunners, Harry Truman, said of cruel, merciless Washington DC that ‘if you want a friend here, get a dog’. Mr Trump has only just begun to discover how many ways DC has of tripping him up in public. I WISH we’d stop boasting about how we spend more on defence than other Nato members. Parliament’s Defence Committee reported last year that our figures were only achieved by ‘moving the goalposts’, such as including Defence Ministry pensions. Our real spending on troops and ships is miserable.