MPs warned over prison service ‘crisis’
WELSH MPs have been presented with a picture of a prison and probation service in “crisis”. Leading figures who represent the men and women who run these services gave a scathing assessment of the state of the sector to the Welsh Affairs Select Committee.
Their claims come on the heels this month of the Welsh Government’s announcement that it will not “facilitate the further development of prisons in Wales”. The UK Government has said it is committed to building a Port Talbot prison, which it is understood could have up to 1,600 inmates.
Wales is already home to the second largest prison in Europe; 2,106-capacity HMP Berwyn in Wrexham.
Andrea Albutt, President of the Prison Governors Association and a former Governor of HMP Swansea, said the transfer of English prisoners to Welsh facilities was a cause of problems.
She said: “This does cause stability issues for the Welsh persons... They are overcrowded with people who are not from Wales who don’t want to be in Wales and are disaffected, really.”
Andy Baxter, the Welsh representative of the POA, the trade union for prison officers, did not hide his opposition to giant prisons.
He said: “As a union we have always been against the super-sized, very large prisons,” adding that “to run them and to staff them is an enormous challenge”.
Mr Baxter warned that violence and psychoactive substances were “undermining all the things we want to do”.
Ms Albutt was frank about the challenges facing prisons, saying: “[Our] prisons are in crisis... The state of our prisons is a direct result of austerity measures.”
Describing other changes that have made it harder to run successful prisons, she said: “We have younger, more violent gangland-type people in prison. We have more organised crime in prisons, then psychoactive substances came into play. All of these things happened [and] a significant number of our prisons are really struggling.”
Ms Albutt, who used to be the governor of Eastwood Park women’s prison in Gloucestershire, described the particular difficulties facing women from Wales in the facility.
She said: “About a third of the women in there were from Wales. It wasn’t good.”
Women from Fishguard, she said, were about 150 miles from home “and with the best will in the world resettlement isn’t going to be easy and family ties aren’t going to be easy”.
She argues there are “far too many people in prison” and that short-term sentences are “pointless” with people going through a “revolving door”.
However, she added: “If we’re going to have people for longer periods then we can do good quality rehabilitation with them... Then if we reduce the population we probably don’t need to build more prisons.
“What we do need to build [are] new prisons because the old prisons we’ve got are falling apart.”
Ms Albutt argued that prisons reflect the social problems found in the communities where they are located.
The former HMP Swansea Governor said: “I think what we’ve got to remember is that prisons are a microcosm of the kind of town or city they are in and Swansea has got some fairly significant issues as a city and the prison will be a microcosm of that.”
Dean Rogers, Assistant General Secretary of the National Association of Probation Officers (Napo) gave a scathing verdict on offender management, saying: “[The] National Probation Service is now the most dysfunctional organisation I’ve ever worked with... It’s just abject chaos.”
In his written evidence he stated that “prison does not work”.