A chilling portrait of anarchy in our jails

WHO runs Britain’s prisons? If today’s profoundly disturbing report on Birmingham jail is any indication, the simple answer to that question is: the prisoners.

And what truly chilling reading the report makes. Inmates out of control and roaming the corridors at will, while prison officers lock themselves in offices for safety.

Violent assaults committed with impunity, blatant drug smuggling, rats and cockroaches, blood and vomit left to fester.

Cannabis was said to be so widespread that even the inspectors felt ‘physically affected’ by the smoke in the air.

This was nothing less than a portrait of anarchy. And while Birmingham may be the worst example, it is not the only one.

Just last month, the doughty Chief Inspector of Prisons, Peter Clarke, warned that conditions across the service were ‘the most disturbing’ ever, singling out Liverpool and Nottingham as being rife with violence, drugs, suicide, self-harm and squalor.

As a first step, management of HMP Birmingham has been taken away from private security firm G4S and brought back under state control.

But this is hardly a solution in itself. Liverpool and Nottingham aren’t privately managed and they are almost as bad.

Prisons minister Rory Stewart has also pledged to resign if he does not achieve a significant reduction in jail violence within a year – and the Mail applauds him. But even that would only scratch the surface.

What’s needed here is a genuinely searching inquiry into how the situation has become so grotesque – followed by a proper strategy for root-and-branch reform.

And reform can’t come soon enough. Right now, the whole penal system seems rotten to the core.