Screwed: Britain’s prison crisis and how to escape it
Battle of Ideas festival speaker Ian Acheson introduces his new book on prison reform.
For years we have covered the ongoing crises in prisons at the Battle of Ideas festival - from broader questions of rehabilitation vs punishment to more recent questions of trans inclusion and overcrowding. Debating Matters, the educational project run by the charity Ideas Matter, took debating to prisons last year, with Debating Matters Beyond Bars proving that prisoners have plenty to say about the world outside. Indeed, I’ve been thinking about prisons a lot over the last few months in the Lords with my amendments to the Victims and Prisoners Bill. I was interviewed by the Independent this week on my proposals to help Imprisonment for Public Protection (IPP) prisoners get answers to their indefinite jail sentences.
Last year, Professor Ian Acheson joined our panel on gender ideology and criminal justice, which looked at the failings in safeguarding and common sense in the prison system. So we were delighted to have Ian give AOI Substackers an introduction to his new book - Screwed: Britain’s prison crisis and how to escape it - and explain some of the ways in which he thinks our prisons are failing. More importantly, he lays out what he thinks we can do to save them. Make sure you get a copy of Ian’s book - and don’t forget to check out some of our Battle archive debates on prisons listed at the end of this Substack. Most importantly, get your tickets for this year’s Battle of Ideas festival.
Screwed: Britain’s prison crisis and how to escape it
Professor Ian Acheson
Imagine you’re a shareholder in a large publicly traded company with an annual turnover north of £6 billion. The company makes widgets and you’ve just discovered that the widgets now have a failure rate of up to 55 per cent, and you can’t swing a cat in the boardroom for knocking over numerous executives who won’t do anything about it. You’d take your money elsewhere, wouldn’t you?
Well, you can’t. I’ve just described His Majesty’s Prison and Probation Service, where 5,400 HQ officials helplessly preside over 120 odd prisons, denuded of frontline staff, awash with drugs and violence, where more than half of all male adult offenders imprisoned for less than 12 months go on to reoffend. You’re underwriting this mess, and it’s getting worse.
My new book - Screwed - is about how and why the once proud law-enforcement agency I worked in has descended into near anarchy and, more importantly, how to get it back on track. Screwed tracks the disastrous political decision making since 2010 that culled 26 per cent of prison officers to save money while the prison population of around 84,000 remained static. What did politicians and their officials who enacted such a criminally stupid strategy think would happen? Every metric of decency, order and safety went into freefall. Prisons are an intensely people-centric business and prisoners are not amenable to being treated like widgets. A vast amount of public money gets wasted on repeat offenders for whom a short prison sentence weaponises future deviance. Deep cuts and managerialist wonkery designed to try to make this mess work has fallen apart.
Screwed as a title serves two purposes. As well as describing the state of the prison system, it evokes the disparaging historic title for prison officers now asked to do an almost impossible job. The latest figures show 8,515 assaults on prison officers in the 12 months to September 2023 - roughly equivalent to one attack every hour of every day. Remote senior bureaucrats who seem more interested in advancing woke ideology than safe prisons are not the answer to hopeful jails where human potential is rescued. Yet their interference is everywhere, partly to justify their continued existence.
Ministers have stood by, apparently impotent while the boss class has expanded, despite the fact that we have filthy high-security prisons, chaotic and violent child jails where staff have surrendered to violence, unvetted and poorly trained teenagers in uniform and where drugs have been found in the systems of over 50 per cent of prisoners tested. We only know about these shameful conditions because of the accident of a random independent inspection. Much of this obscene mess is not simply down to lack of resources, but the absence of leadership.
As readers of this Substack are interested in ideas, I’m going to stop moaning about the ills of prisons, and list some of the cures I think might help. The primary challenge is a simple one of supply and demand – the physics of incarceration are currently implacable. Far too many people are locked up by far too few people, for all the good we can do them in punishment, deterrence and rehabilitation. Building new prison cells simply cannot outpace the number sentenced. With current rates of reoffending, prisons are an insane arms race already. We must have secure custody with the time and space to deal with violent and dangerous people, or those who have committed or intend to commit grave crimes against the state.
This leaves a large number of non-violent offenders, particularly those driven to acquisitive crimes to feed habits, languishing in fetid penal dustbins where their drug habits remain and their criminality is entrenched. I do not deny that these people - numbering several thousands - torture communities. With police only belatedly realising that shoplifting is a crime, their activities have shut down corner shops dragging poor communities further into a spiral of decline. But these people are primarily a medical problem, not a criminal justice one, and they should receive compulsory treatment in secure NHS facilities.
We also need to expand our open prisons to allow progress towards release for prisoners stuck in a logjam of closed conditions because of risk aversion and a lack of space. Prisoners who are held in this way, but allowed to go out and work during the day, are far less likely to reoffend than those shut away for 23 hours a day in a space not much bigger than a disabled parking bay. Prisoners, wherever they are, should be paid the minimum wage for a decent days work with bonuses for productivity, not the paltry sum they currently get. These wages will have compulsory deductions for bed, board, victim reparation and release savings. Work is about the only thing we know that has a huge impact on desistance from offending. We need many more of what I call Enterprise Prisons, where the potential to harness skills used in the dark economy can be repurposed.
These are some long-term strategies that could clear prisons of the space and time needed to deal with society’s predators. In the immediate term, there is a crisis of confidence in frontline staff that is making rehabilitation impossible. Don’t take my word for it, this is written into almost every chief inspectors report. Officers are unable or unwilling to enforce basic standards of civility on the landings. This is often due to inexperience – as huge number of staff have left the service on voluntary exit packages.
Those left are far too few, mostly very young who lack the training and the life experience to deal with sophisticated street-wise prisoners. Staff also perceive that they won’t be backed up by managers who are ready to pounce on misgendering but entirely absent when the alarm bell goes off. Official statistics show these people are leaving almost as fast as they can be recruited, often before their probation period has finished. Along with eye-watering levels of sickness, much of it due to stress, and you give governors an impossible task of staffing prisons. Selection, training and leadership all need fundamental reform and external scrutiny. It doesn’t help that, unlike any other country in western Europe, we have a deliberate gulf between frontline staff in uniform and senior managers in suits. But then, mandarins probably think Esprit de Corps is a French car.
There are very many more ideas in Screwed, including the replacement of the excellent but largely powerless inspectorate with a legal regulator able to enforce minimum standards and investigate wrongdoing. We should also replace the mad, baffling layers of administrative wet blankets sitting on top of governors - with a chief governor, a chief officer and a chief probation officer at the very top. The situation in our prisons is very serious, but it is salvageable. It is a great disappointment that the Conservative government haven’t acted in the spirit of humility to halt the decline they started. Whoever is in charge after the next election will have the same problem. Take action to value and protect your frontline staff, or we’re all screwed.
Professor Ian Acheson is senior adviser at the Counter Extremism Project and teaches prison counter-insurgency at the University of Exeter’s strategic security institute as well a being a visiting professor at the University of Staffordshire school of justice, security and sustainability. His new book, Screwed: Britain’s prison crisis and how to escape it, is published by Biteback.
Explore our Battle archive for more debates and discussions on the prisons and the justice system:
After the Riots: is prison reform still possible?
Prison riots have become a familiar feature of Britain’s custodial system. Over the past 20 years, the prison population has doubled even though crime rates have fallen steadily. Some authorities claim that these riots are the result of overcrowding. Others blame underfunding and privatisation, the increasing use of synthetic drugs and the effects of the smoking ban. But are these explanations simplistic? What about problems of mental illness and political extremism? Fundamental questions persist: what is prison for - rehabilitation or punishment? Does the public even care about conditions inside as long as criminals are removed from the streets?
Speakers: Pamela Dow, chief reform officer, Catch22; former civil servant, Department for Education; Hardeep Matharu, prisons and criminal justice reporter, Byline; Rachel O’Brien, consultant, editor and writer; author, Building a Rehabilitation Culture and The Learning Prison; Paul, Stop the Knife lead, London Village Network; former prisoner; Jerry Petherick, managing director for custody and detention services, G4S
Gender ideology and criminal justice
Some of the biggest controversies in relation to gender identity and criminal justice concern transwomen prisoners in women’s jails. While the government has acknowledged the safeguarding loopholes created where registered sex offenders change their name by deed poll, why do the authorities fail to address the problems created by the ability to change identity in a more fundamental way by simultaneously changing gender as well? How can rules of safeguarding be effective if they do not apply equally to everyone? Why are members of one group excused from the normal requirements of safeguarding? Or is changing gender itself a special category in need of particular and special legal and safeguarding protection?
Speakers: Professor Ian Acheson, senior advisor, Counter Extremism Project; visiting professor, school of law, policing and forensics, University of Staffordshire, Dr Kate Coleman, founder and director, Keep Prisons Single Sex; Ceri-Lee Galvin
sexual abuse victim; campaigner for changes to safeguarding regulations created by exemptions for gender change perpetrator
Prisons: I predict a riot?
The trend for politicians to create an endless array of new offences, from online offence to protests, means it is perhaps easier than ever to be branded a criminal and locked up. Is prison the answer to such problems? What’s the balance between rehabilitation and retribution, and how do they both affect recidivism? Is there any place for compassion in punishment? Is it possible to have a nuanced discussion on the role of prison?
Speakers: Dr Piers Benn, philosopher, author and lecturer; Michael Campbell
expert advisor to prisons; founder, De Profundis; commissioning board member, National Probation Service; Jessica Mullen, director of influence and communications, Clinks; lead and author, Young Review final report
Rehabilitation: incarcerated social work or humane prison reform?
One of the concerns about the headline-grabbing prison crisis is that rehabilitation is being sidelined by staff shortages, overcrowding and spending cuts. Frequently caricatured as a soft approach to penal policy, today’s advocates of rehabilitation often present it as a silver bullet to stop reoffending. But is prison just about rehabilitation? For many, the role of prison is for punishment and deterrence rather than to cut reoffending. Can the system do both? Others complain that prison officers are being co-opted into acting as social workers. Is it utopian thinking to expect prison to solve prisoners’ social problems that are so often neglected 'outside’?
Speakers: Alice Dawnay, co-founder and CEO, Switchback; winner, Robin Corbett Prisoner Reintegration Award 2016; Dr David Maguire, British Academy postdoctoral fellow, Centre for Education in the Criminal Justice System, UCL; editorial board member, Prison Service Journal; Jerry Petherick, managing director for custody and detention services, G4S; Natasha Porter, chief executive officer, Unlocked Graduates; Adam Rawcliffe, associate fellow, Academy of Ideas; former prison officer
Early-bird tickets are now available for the Battle of Ideas festival 2024, which will take place at Church House, Westminster on Saturday 19 and Sunday 20 October. Get your tickets here.
Interestingly there's no mention of how within certain prisons Islamic Laws are being implemented by the prisoners, while the prison officers look on. Something is needed to disempower this take over bid. As Ian Acheson says there are ways in which prisons could be improved without costing a fortune, but what also needs to be looked into, is has the prisoner profile changed? If criminal activity itself [burglary, petty theft, etc] becomes de criminalised & replaced with people being accused of Thought Crimes; is this affecting prison populations, & who're potentially going to be more open to bullying & hence conversion in order to get out alive & potentially influenced to believe that to kill in the name of Allah is an act of faith not of criminality. In France islamists are placed in solitary confinement with an hour in the exercise yard alone. The prison guards aren't even allowed to speak to them & never do more than a week to avoid any connections being formed between them. We need to prevent the radicalisation of prisoners, & make sure that those who do deserve to be in prison get the sentence that represents the crime. My understanding is that Grooming Gang members may [if we're lucky] serve the time, but are celebrated once released. With the disappearance of Cultural homogeneity new crimes & new forms of perception have evolved; & I don't think any country in Europe was prepared for or understands how it should be navigated. If we're to survive, then INMHO, it's time to make it clear that we celebrate Life not Death, that Women have equality, that children have a right to a childhood without ANY complications being thrown in to the mix, that we have the right to offend & to be offended, Blasphemy Laws aren't acceptable in a Christian country that's primarily secular but developed a tolerance for all belief systems & cultures. We need to recognise that it's our history that's created this mess, because we've allowed the Language of Tolerance to become weaponised & has now morphed into a Language of Intolerance that's used against a Culture of Tolerance, & created a major judicial crisis.