Prisons Post Wandsworth

 

 

When late lamented Lord Ramsbotham was appointed Chief Inspector of Prisons in 1995 he was told “that a good day for the Prison Service was one on which no one escaped, and no one was locked out and held in a police cell for which it had to pay.” 

He was also told that improvements were only made by implementing recommendations made by outsiders following disasters. Could some long term good come from Wednesday’s troubling events in south west London? Prisons are certainly getting some overdue political, public and media attention, for good or ill. 

In the short term we are likely to see heads roll at Wandsworth and possibly in headquarters. Expect too detainees charged with terrorist offences to be placed in (and moved to) top security jails other than in exceptional circumstances. In the medium term, there may be some broader changes to the categorisation framework which has been in place for more than fifty years.

For the longer term, much depends on who Justice Secretary Alex Chalk appoints to lead the independent inquiry into what happened and their terms of reference. We could get something like Lord Woolf’s report after the 1990 Strangeways riot. It roamed widely across the criminal justice terrain and urged a balance between security, control, and fairness in prisons.

Or we could get the narrower focus of the inquiries which followed the escapes of six prisoners from the high-security Whitemoor prison in September 1994 and of three prisoners from Parkhurst four months later.

Highly critical of the ‘yawning gap between the prison service’s ideals and actual practice’, these noted the mixed ideologies within the Prison Service, intent on increasing physical security to prevent escapes but wishing to provide the greater element of care and positive relationships which Woolf wanted to see.

In particular, Sir John Learmont’s comprehensive review of security recommended nationally agreed building standards, together with the installation of up-to-date electronic devices such as CCTV, electronic movement detectors and electronic locks. These were widely implemented across the estate and have arguably contributed to the prison service’s generally good record on escapes since then. But they swallowed high levels of resources during a period of rising imprisonment and put the brakes on the Woolf agenda.

Ramsbotham’s comments were made in a debate in which he proposed a Royal Commission on the state of prisons.  This form of public inquiry which “take minutes and waste years” is out of fashion and would be an indulgence.

But a time limited and wide ranging exercise like Woolf’s is long overdue. All but one of his 12 key recommendations were accepted by the government in 1991.  The one that was not accepted was that no prison should hold more prisoners than its uncrowded capacity, with parliament to be informed if it did. Woolf later came to see overcrowding as a cancer of the system which limited implementation of his comprehensive agenda for reform.  

At the end of last month, the uncrowded capacity was 950 at Wandsworth. It actually held 1,617 men. That is fundamentally why it’s holding one fewer than it should today.